Artificial intelligence rivals Anthropic and OpenAI both rolled out education services within 24 hours of each other.
The services are aimed at college students ahead of their final exams. They’re part of a wider push by the two companies to capture the education market through partnerships with universities and convert students into users before they graduate and enter the workforce.
Anthropic on Wednesday debuted Claude for Education, a specialized version of its popular chatbot designed for college students, while OpenAI announced on Thursday that it would make ChatGPT Plus free for U.S. and Canadian college students through May.
Claude for Education includes a “learning mode” designed to guide students’ reasoning rather than provide answers. Anthropic secured university-wide access agreements with Northeastern University, Champlain College, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. The Northeastern partnership will provide Claude access to 50,000 students, faculty and staff across 13 global campuses, according to Anthropic.
The startup also announced an ambassadors program that allows students to work “directly with the Anthropic team” to launch educational initiatives on their campuses.
As part of its student announcement, OpenAI said that students would be able to use ChatGPT’s voice mode, image generation feature and the company’s Deep Research tool for academic research papers.
OpenAI has said that more than one-third of college-aged adults in the United States use ChatGPT, and that about a quarter of their messages relate to learning and school work.
“Today’s college students face enormous pressure to learn faster, tackle harder problems, and enter a workforce increasingly shaped by AI,” OpenAI Vice President of Education Leah Belsky said in a statement. “Supporting their AI literacy means more than demonstrating how these tools work. It requires creating space for students to engage directly, experiment, learn from peers, and ask their own questions.”
Anthropic’s launch of Claude for Education directly competes with a product OpenAI introduced last May, ChatGPT Edu — a version of the chatbot built for universities to “responsibly deploy AI” for students.
