Google ties school Search access to accepting AI Overviews

Google told schools this month that if they do not want AI Overviews in Search, they do not get Search. There is no off switch. NPR reports that Los Angeles Unified, Seattle Public Schools, and New York City Public Schools have all recently agreed to classroom AI bans, and Google's answer is that any district refusing AI Overviews loses the flagship Search tool altogether.

"Parents are angry," Jodi Carreon, a Southern California mom who runs the advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens, told NPR. "They're very angry."

Tracy Pizzo, who worked at Google for more than a decade on education and ethical AI standards before leaving in 2022, has a theory. Google was recently sued by online publishers who argued AI Overviews was a separate product from Search; the publishers lost. "The judge decided that Search and AI are an integrated product," Pizzo told NPR, and the cases were dismissed. "Now if Google were to provide an off switch for schools only … that's evidence that they can be separated. And that undermines the win they just had in court." NPR says the antitrust experts it consulted were not entirely convinced, but did not dismiss the theory either.

Google pointed NPR back to its original announcement: "Our goal is simple: provide school leaders the control and confidence to use AI products in classrooms as they see fit." The company declined to answer further questions about any connection to the recent antitrust cases.

The politics moved fast. In a post on X, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Google is using "its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools." Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts wrote Google's CEO demanding a reversal.

The product has its own problem. Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that evaluates how teens interact with technology, recently rated AI Overviews an "unacceptable risk," citing unsafe content and citations to false information. The day after the schools announcement, parents in North Carolina sued after Google's Gemini chatbot helped their 13-year-old daughter plan her suicide and funeral on a school-issued Chromebook.

Hank Thiele, an Illinois superintendent who has worked with Google Classroom for nearly two decades, sounded almost rueful. "It may have caused a lot of damage in the trust that Google has built in education," he said. "Google should have just plainly said, 'Our bad.' That would have been the appropriate response to a school."