Anthropic announced a partnership with Teach For All to bring AI training to educators across 63 countries. Through the "AI Literacy & Creator Collective," more than 100,000 teachers and alumni in Teach For All's network will get Claude access and training on how to use it in classrooms serving 1.5 million students.
The timing is not coincidental. This announcement lands amid a coordinated week of education plays from the major AI companies. The interesting question isn't whether AI will transform education (it will) but who captures the teacher relationship first, because that's where the long-term strategic value lies.
Three Strategies, One Goal
Each company's approach reveals their broader playbook.
Microsoft's education push centers on giving away Copilot subscriptions. It's the classic land-and-expand: get the tools into schools for free, build familiarity and dependency, then convert institutions to paid tiers once budgets allow. Microsoft has done this for decades with Office; AI is just the new wedge.
Google's approach is infrastructure-first. The $1 billion commitment to universities targets research partnerships and cloud credits. Own the research pipeline, train the next generation of AI researchers on your stack, and the enterprise customers follow. It's patient capital with a long payback horizon.
Anthropic's Teach For All partnership takes a different angle: teachers as co-developers. The structure explicitly positions educators "not as passive consumers of AI tools, but as co-architects shaping how AI develops." Teachers get Claude access; Anthropic gets on-the-ground feedback from 63 countries. "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," said Teach For All CEO Wendy Kopp.
This mirrors the approach Anthropic has taken in other sectors. As we covered with the UK government partnership, Anthropic is increasingly positioning Claude as infrastructure for public services, with real-world feedback loops baked into the deal structure.
The Program Mechanics
The AI Literacy & Creator Collective runs three interconnected programs:
The AI Fluency Learning Series offers six live episodes covering Claude capabilities and classroom applications. Over 530 educators attended the first series in November 2025.
Claude Connect serves as an ongoing community hub with more than 1,000 educators from 60+ countries sharing prompts and use cases.
Claude Lab gives participants Claude Pro access to test implementations with advanced features, plus monthly office hours with Anthropic's team. Within four days of announcing the program, Anthropic received over 200 applications.
The concrete examples are worth noting. A teacher in Liberia built an interactive climate education curriculum using Claude Artifacts. In Bangladesh, a teacher working with students struggling with basic numeracy created a gamified math app with boss battles and XP rewards. These aren't AI replacing teachers; they're teachers using AI as a force multiplier for problems they already understand deeply.
Why Teachers Matter More Than Students
The strategic logic here is subtle but important. Students are transient; they graduate. Teachers stick around for decades. A teacher who learns to build curriculum in Claude, who develops muscle memory for Anthropic's tools, who has a library of prompts and artifacts, isn't switching to Gemini or GPT next year.
More importantly, teachers shape student defaults. If students learn to research and write and study with Claude because that's what their teacher uses, those habits persist. The next generation of college students, then workers, then managers will reach for the tool they know.
This is why the co-development framing matters. Anthropic isn't just distributing software; they're building relationships with educators who will provide feedback that shapes Claude's education features, making it more suited to classroom use, making teachers more likely to stay.
The Real Competition
The race for the classroom is ultimately about something bigger than education revenue. It's about which AI system becomes the ambient default for an entire generation.
Microsoft has distribution through existing school IT contracts. Google has infrastructure and research credibility. Anthropic has neither, so they're competing on product intimacy: deep engagement with a smaller number of committed users whose feedback improves the product for everyone.
Whether that works depends on whether 100,000 engaged teachers can outweigh Microsoft's millions of Copilot licenses. The smart money says distribution usually wins. But Anthropic is betting that in AI, where the product genuinely improves through use, the co-development model might be a viable path.
We'll know within a year which thesis holds up. Our read: distribution usually wins, but Anthropic is playing a longer game than the next budget cycle.