National Academy for AI Instruction — AFT, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic's $23M Teacher-Training Hub

In Fall 2025, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) opened the National Academy for AI Instruction, a physical training hub in Manhattan built with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic. The $23 million initiative — including $8 million in direct funding plus $2 million in technical support and computing credits from OpenAI — offers in-person workshops, online courses, credential pathways and continuing-education credits designed to teach K-12 educators to use AI tools "wisely, safely and ethically," according to AFT president Randi Weingarten.
The academy initially serves AFT's 1.8 million members, starting with K-12 educators, and states a five-year goal of training roughly 400,000 educators — about 10% of the U.S. teaching workforce — reaching more than 7.2 million students. AFT plans to expand the model into regional hubs by 2030 and to treat the Manhattan site as an "innovation lab" that refines its curriculum using feedback from participating classrooms.
As of this pilot's first cohort, no independent evaluation of instructional or student-learning outcomes has been published, and the public announcements do not detail specific data-privacy safeguards, bias-audit procedures or independent oversight of the vendor partnerships — a gap consistent with the program's early stage rather than evidence of harm.

Read the full analysis: https://www.aft.org/press-release/aft-launch-national-academy-ai-instruction-microsoft-openai-anthropic-and-united