President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday that makes artificial intelligence (AI) part of the K-12 school curriculum.
The “Advancing artificial intelligence education for American youth” could potentially reshape how AI is used in U.S. classrooms. It instructs the Education and Labor Departments to help train K-12 students in the use of AI and make it part of teaching-related tasks. The order was first reported by the Washington Post, which obtained a draft of the order.
Private sector AI companies, which could include Elon Musk’s xAI, and OpenAI, would also be asked to be part of the program, helping to develop programs to run in schools.
The order, one of seven education-related directives Trump signed Wednesday, calls AI a “driving innovation across industries, enhancing productivity, and reshaping the way we live and work. To ensure the United States remains a global leader in this technological revolution, we must provide our Nation’s youth with opportunities to cultivate the skills and understanding necessary to use and create the next generation of AI technology.”
The order creates a White House Task Force on AI Education, whose members include Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. It will be chaired by Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Trump also directed the Department of Education to favor the application of AI in discretionary grant programs for teacher training, the National Science Foundation to prioritize research on the use of AI in education, and the Labor Department to expand AI-related apprenticeships. “This is a big deal, because AI seems to be where it’s at,” Trump said before he signed the order in the Oval Office.
The directives are the latest examples of the Trump Administration’s use of executive orders to encourage AI adoption and training as the country competes with China and others to integrate the technology. A broad swath of Democrats and Republicans have expressed fears that American students falling behind other nations, particularly China, as AI becomes an essential staple of the economy, infrastructure and everyday life.
“We have literally trillions of dollars being invested in AI,” Trump said Wednesday. “Somebody today, a very smart person, said that AI is the way to the future. I don’t know if that’s right or not, but certainly very smart people are investing in it.”
The White House is an aggressive backer of Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure project over four years led by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle Corp. The president has also strongly encouraged massive investments in AI from Big Tech members such as Apple Inc. ($500 billion over several years).
