This week: Norway bans generative AI in primary schools; a Stanford study finds that giving children an AI tutor is not the same as them using one; and a new Anthropic policy shows what age verification actually costs. Plus, the first of a collaboration on the social media consultation survey.
🔍 This week I’ve been thinking about…
I’m at IDC 2026 this week, and the world is melting, so this is a short one.
It’s almost a relief to have three AI (not social media) news stories this week, but — but! — they echo some of the issues that have come out around the arguments on banning social media for kids. Norway has banned generative AI in elementary schools (age 6–13: an age where they wouldn’t technically be expected to access it out of home?), and Anthropic is making more noise about how it must up its use of age verification tools — so more adults will have to provide copies of formal documentation to goodness knows whom to access the service. Offset that against the story in the middle: researchers find that kids don’t actually want to use AI tutors, actually? Making the speed around decisions to ban continue to look out of touch with the use amongst the average kid. This is a very hot topic at the conference this week: hopefully by next week I can report on some of the research coming out of it!
📰 Three things worth your attention
1. Norway is banning generative AI in elementary schools starting this autumn — TNW
From late August, generative AI tools will be barred for children in years one to seven, ages six to 13. Students aged 14 to 16 will be allowed to use them only under a teacher’s direct supervision. Over-17s are trusted to manage it themselves.
The logic is borrowed straight from Norway’s 2024 school smartphone ban, and that ban has an evidence base behind it. A study by Sara Abrahamsson of more than 400 middle schools found it was followed by less bullying, better grades, and a sharp drop in visits to psychological specialists, with the strongest effects among girls. But: the smartphone ban came in response to falling test scores. There’s no comparable signal that AI use in Norwegian classrooms has reached a level that produces measurable harm. The new ban is precautionary (which is not in itself a bad thing, but should be the start, not the end, of the investigation).
2. Research on AI tutoring ran into a problem: most students wouldn’t use it — Chalkbeat
Stanford researchers set out to test whether a human tutor’s encouragement would get children to spend more time with an AI literacy tutor. It did, by between one and four minutes a week. Many children never logged on at all.
The platform’s own guidance said 30 minutes a week would improve reading. In the afterschool setting, children working independently averaged about two minutes a week, rising to three with a tutor alongside them. There was no meaningful difference in reading scores between the groups. As the lead author put it, having access to the tool was not the same as using it.
Additionally: the children who did log on were more likely to be already higher-performing, and less likely to have additional needs. So the tool reached the children least likely to need the catch-up it promises, at least when presented in this way. And the study is a quiet rebuke to the access logic that drives so much of this, on both sides.
3. Anthropic says Claude may want to see your ID — TechCrunch
A new version of Anthropic’s privacy policy, due to take effect on 8 July, says the company may in certain circumstances ask users to verify their age or identity by uploading a government-issued ID, along with a selfie or video, from which it builds a face geometry template. Some US states treat that template as legally protected biometric data (as do countries that apply GDPR or similar data protection laws). Anthropic’s account, reported by TechCrunch, is that this applies to a small subset of users whose accounts have been flagged but not banned, as part of an appeals process, and that the checks run through a third-party verifier. TechCrunch notes the verifier is backed by a Peter Thiel fund and has drawn criticism elsewhere, and that Anthropic would not say how long the documents are kept.
The reason this belongs in a newsletter about children is that it shows what age assurance actually looks like once it leaves the policy document. To prove a child is a child, you build an infrastructure that asks everyone to hand a government ID and a scan of their face to a private company.
🔁 ICYMI
The sub-par science of the social media ban, Part 1 — The Neuroscience of Everyday Life
I’ve been working with Dean Burnett to dig into the wider problems with the framing of the UK’s social media consultation, and this is the first of the pieces on this. Where my entry point has been the young children’s survey, his has been the parent’s one. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that we’ve come to similar conclusions — and that there are far too many of those conclusions for a single blogpost.
Part 1 looks at two things. The speed: the consultation ran from early March to late May, with roughly three weeks between it closing and the ban being announced, against the equal-marriage consultation’s longer run and six months of review before any decision. And who answered: of around 116,000 contributions, only about 12% came through routes built for children and young people, while some 33,000 were campaign emails in which people signed a standard pro-ban text, each counted as an individual submission.
The point is not that worried parents are wrong. It’s that a self-selecting sample of the most worried adults is not the same thing as evidence. Worth looking at the graphs showing the difference between the responses given by the focus groups run alongside the consultation, and the parent responses to the consultation to see why we’ve come to that conclusion.
🔬 What’s new with CAISE
I’m at IDC this week, enjoying workshops on building community-centred AI literacy, writing a manifesto on children’s rights as they pertain to AI in edtech…and presenting my short literature review paper today (Wednesday). So it’s mostly conference and not much else from me.
→ What are you seeing in your school, your research, or your own use of AI this week?
Let me know, or share this with someone who is trying to figure it out.