Hand in Hand: Schools’ Embrace of AI Connected to Increased Risks to Students
Artificial intelligence (AI) has continued to alter the educational experiences of teachers, students, and parents during the 2024-25 school year. The frequency and variety of AI uses continues to grow; at the same time, the increased use of AI in educational settings is correlated with heightened risks to students. This report details the current status of AI use in schools along with four emerging risks associated with this technology, all of which increase the more that a school uses AI:
Data breaches or ransomware attacks;
Tech-enabled sexual harassment and bullying;
AI systems that do not work as intended; and
Troubling interactions between students and technology.
Additional topics covered in this report include AI literacy, deepfake non-consensual intimate imagery, student activity monitoring, privacy issues related to transgender and immigrant students, and more.
Identifying the concrete risks that accompany the use of AI in schools enables education leaders, policymakers, and communities to mount prevention and response efforts so that the positive uses of AI are not overshadowed by harm to students.
Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
CDT joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
As concern about risks and harms related to AI systems continue to grow, a growing chorus of policymakers, industry leaders, and advocates have called for independent AI assessments. This explainer provides an overview of recent proposals for third-party assessment in the United States, including state and federal legislation, executive actions, and industry proposals.
Having third parties assess AI systems might seem like common sense, but crafting effective policies toward this goal can be devilishly tricky. A poorly-constructed ecosystem for third-party assessment could easily fail to consider the most consequential mechanisms of risk, neglect the AI harms that most impact people, or do more to protect AI companies than people.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
