There is an arms race among universities about what tools should be made available to students. There are equity of access issues here - wealthy students are likely to pay out of pocket for more expensive subscriptions, regardless of what universities provide. Princeton announced that it's providing everyone with chatGPT subscriptions (the equivalent of the $20/mo GPT 6 Astra). Cornell is doing something similar, including Claude. This is likely just the beginning, as the major AI firms want to hook customers for life provide a great opportunity to many users, and prestigious universities don't want to risk being perceived as inadequate relative to their peers.
In the meantime, it's honestly not clear if undergraduate students even want this. This WSJ article talks about how demand is through the roof at Harvard for a reading-intensive humanities course. The reaction from some students at Princeton to being given GPT subscriptions is not exactly a ringing endorsement.
There is no question that these tools, when used correctly, can be powerful tools to develop educational materials. A nice example that has gone a bit viral in the last week is this site, by Nathan Liow, an undergraduate CS major at UT Austin. He's been using Claude Opus 5.5 to create interactive visuals to go with the notes he took from his AP courses, leading to some very clean demonstrations for calculus, statistics, and physics. Without these tools, it would be a huge investment of effort to create these kinds of visualizations.
We must figure out the ways that AI capabilities can help learning, rather than removing all of the "intellectual friction" needed to build up analytical skills, critical thinking, and knowledge.
Separately: Tomorrow is Election Day in the US. If you are eligible, please vote! The only way representative government can work remotely effectively is if the electorate stands up and votes. (Corollary: Anyone who pins their political strategy on suppressing voter turnout does not believe in representative government.)
