This article was originally published in Unite.AI on 9/17/26 by Ana Sofia Herazo
The children of New York City’s public schools returned this fall with far less artificial intelligence (AI) within reach.
On September 2, Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York City Public Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels announced a one-year moratorium that blocks student-facing generative AI, including AI tutors and chatbots, for roughly 600,000 students from pre-K through eighth grade, about two-thirds of the largest school system in the country. Companion chatbots are barred at every grade level, and high schools keep only a narrow opening: a few thousand students in vetted pilot programs.
“Children need teachers and human connection in order to learn and grow,” Mamdani argued. It is a sweeping action built on growing concern across the country about the use of AI in classrooms.
In May, the American Federation of Teachers stood up at the National Press Club to call for banning screen time in the earliest grades, ending student-facing AI in elementary schools, and prohibiting companion chatbots for anyone under 16 years of age.
“Today’s biggest cybersecurity threats aren’t tied to the device itself. They’re tied to cloud accounts and the data they contain.”
Charlie Sander, CEO, ManagedMethods
Randi Weingarten, the federation’s president, isn’t calling for a Chromebook bonfire. She cited a survey of 3,000 teachers in which 88% said their students’ attention spans were shrinking, along with reading and math scores that climbed for years before falling as classroom tech use grew.
What she wanted, she said, was the balance set right.
Across the country, at least 17 states are weighing bills to slow technology use during school hours, and other major cities like Los Angeles have resolved to implement screen time limits as well.
Some edtech companies, however, worry that blanket bans may inadvertently lead to removing access to technology tools for the most vulnerable students.
For most kids, losing access to a screen or a chatbot is a minor inconvenience. For some of them, according to some people in the AI space, it’s a genuine loss with nothing to fill the gap…
