Iceland's National AI Pilot: Claude and Gemini for Teacher Lesson Planning

Anthropic and Iceland's Ministry of Education and Children (via the Directorate of Education and School Services) announced a partnership described as one of the first national-level AI-in-education pilots, running for six months from October 2025 to April 2026.
The pilot gave about 300 teachers (roughly 5% of Iceland's primary and lower-secondary teaching workforce) access to Google's Gemini, and about 260 teachers (roughly 14% of upper-secondary and vocational teachers) access to Claude.edu from Anthropic, together covering close to 7% of the country's teachers.
The programme is meant to support teachers, counsellors and school leaders exploring how AI can help with lesson planning and teaching within the Icelandic curriculum context, and includes training materials and a dedicated support network.
The European Trade Union Committee for Education (CSEE-ETUCE) publicly questioned what concrete benefit the pilot would deliver for teachers and raised data-governance concerns, and independent commentary noted that despite being framed by early announcements as a national, systemic initiative, the actual pilot is a small, non-random sample; as of the programme's scheduled close, no independent outcome evaluation had been published.

Read the full analysis: https://island.is/en/o/directorate-of-education-and-school-services/ai-pilot-project