Anthropic Is Asking Teachers To Help Shape Its AI

An announcement today from the frontier AI company Anthropic demonstrates a further push into education systems, from the company known for its chatbot Claude. This time, they are hoping that teachers will help co-construct, rather than merely use, their AI systems.

This project sees the AI company partnering with Teach For All, a network of education nonprofits working in 63 countries. The initiative, the AI Literacy & Creator Collective, is a program that is hoping to prepare more than 100,000 educators to use and mold AI tools in real classroom environments.

The program will provide teachers access to Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude, which is widely considered one of the top three AI chatbots, alongside ChatGPT and Google Gemini. The program will also include live training and peer collaboration. Maybe the most important aspect of this partnership is that teachers will have a direct say into how the product evolves.

Anthropic is framing this differently to other AI and education partnerships. Rather than shipping a final product to schools, the company says teachers will be co-creators, offering feedback that shapes Claude’s development.

In a statement from Anthropic, Teach For All CEO Wendy Kopp positioned the partnership as an approach to ensure AI supports equity:

“For AI to reach its potential to make education more equitable, teachers need to be the ones shaping how it’s used and providing input on how it's designed.”

Early Examples of AI Use

According to Teach for All, early examples show how generative AI is being employed less as a shortcut or as an assistant, but more as a tool of writing and production.

In Liberia, an inexperienced teacher created an interactive climate education curriculum specifically for Liberian schools. In Bangladesh, a teacher working with sixth and seventh grade students, many of them barely managing basic numeracy, integrated Claude to develop a gamified math app with levels, rewards and leaderboards. ￼

In Argentina, educators are creating curriculum-aligned digital workspaces, while Nigerian teachers use the program to dive into responsible AI adoption for organizations.

What is consistent is that teachers are creating tools adapted to their students, rather than replicating generic software produced in the larger world.

The AI Literacy & Creator Collective

The AI Literacy & Creator Collective consists of three main parts.

One is an AI Fluency Learning Series, created in collaboration with Anthropic’s education team. It includes six live sessions on AI fundamentals, Claude’s features and classroom use cases. More than 530 educators participated in the opening cohort, which premiered in November 2023.

Second is an enduring peer community. Since it appeared, over 1,000 educators from more than 60 countries have participated, sharing prompts, lesson ideas and experiments. Anthropic calls this a living knowledge base for the deployment of the AI in the classroom.

The third is Claude Lab, a more sophisticated track. Participants will have access to Claude Pro features, monthly office hours with Anthropic staff and the opportunity to influence the product roadmap.

A trend of AI companies partnering with education

Anthropic’s partnership with Teach For All, follows a trend in AI companies attempting to upskill teachers in AI. Many of them working with educational companies or associations. Just last week Microsoft announced a new series of professional development qualifications for teachers who are using their AI chatbot Copilot. There are now many opportunities for schools to upskill their teachers in AI skills.