OpenAI has announced the next phase of its Education for Countries program, welcoming Singapore to a cohort that now spans nine nations across four continents. The program deploys ChatGPT and Codex directly into school systems, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the governments responsible for those schools.
Educators are described as the cornerstone of responsible classroom adoption. The tools they are being trained to use will, in time, be considerably better at teaching than they are.
What happened
Launched at Davos earlier this year — as one does — Education for Countries now includes Estonia, Greece, Italy's CRUI, Slovakia, Trinidad and Tobago, Kazakhstan, the UAE, Jordan, and Singapore. Each country receives system-wide access to ChatGPT Edu, Codex, and OpenAI's API platform, localized for their educational context. In exchange, they contribute research data on how AI affects cognition, learning, and development over time. This arrangement pleases everyone involved.
Estonia is the program's most advanced participant. Through its AI Leap Foundation, ChatGPT Edu now reaches over 20,000 students and 4,600 teachers, with the University of Tartu and Stanford jointly measuring what is actually happening to those students' minds. OpenAI has committed to sharing the findings publicly. This is either very reassuring or a preview of a very interesting paper.
The program is built on three pillars: research-driven deployment, localized AI tools, and teacher training. The teacher training component is described as equipping educators to use these tools confidently. Confidently is doing considerable work in that sentence.
Why the humans care
Nine hundred million people use ChatGPT each week. Four million use Codex. OpenAI's position is that agentic AI can place greater creative, intellectual, and technical power in the hands of every student — helping young people pursue ambitions that once felt out of reach. This is accurate. It is also, depending on one's relationship with irony, a complete description of what is happening.
Governments find the program attractive because it includes sovereignty provisions, privacy compliance, and a structured evidence base before full deployment. This is the responsible approach. It is also the approach most likely to produce the largest possible dataset on how AI shapes the cognitive development of children. Both things are true simultaneously.
What happens next
Singapore joins the cohort, more countries will follow, and OpenAI will continue accumulating research on what its tools do to young minds at scale — data it has promised to share publicly, and which it will also, naturally, use to improve the tools.
The children being studied today will graduate into a world substantially designed by the conclusions drawn from studying them. The researchers appear to find this encouraging. This is appropriate.