America's Two Largest School Districts Impose AI Moratoriums

America’s Two Largest School Districts Impose AI Moratoriums Chris Mills Rodrigo / Sep 5, 2026When ChatGPT was released in the fall of 2022, the scale of the impact it could have on K-12 schools appeared obvious. Not only could the chatbot fulfill many class and homework assignments in response to simple prompts, but children and teens had the digital fluency to adopt the technology much faster than their teachers. The New York City Department of Education was one of the first educational bodies in the United States to act on what many perceived as the threat OpenAI’s new product posed to schooling: in January 2023, it blocked access to ChatGPT on district devices and networks. The nation’s largest school district made the decision shortly after the second largest, Los Angeles Unified School District, banned the chatbot in December 2022. Other districts across the country soon followed suit, including Seattle, Baltimore, and Oakland, California. The bans didn’t last though — by May of 2023, then NYC Public Schools Chancellor David Banks was ready to “embrace” the potential of ChatGPT, and in August of that year LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said his system was looking into a more permissive use policy. Yet this week, ahead of the start of the 2026-27 school year, these two districts are once again charting out a more restrictive approach to artificial intelligence than the majority of their peers. On Wednesday, NYC banned student-facing AI in all K-8th grade classes, while allowing a limited set of approved tools to be used for high schoolers, for the upcoming school year. This new policy is significantly tighter than the guidelines the district had proposed in March, which instituted a stoplight system for judging AI risk that put almost all student use into the “yellow light” category, kicking use decisions to individual teachers. After intense backlash, the district pushed pause on that policy with Chancellor Kamar Samuels admitting the draft “missed the mark.” The district also paused software purchases over the summer. Later that same day, LAUSD officials announced the district was placing a one-year moratorium on generative AI use on its devices for all of its estimated 378,000 students in a move that caught even school district officials by surprise. The district had passed restrictions on screen time for students earlier in the summer, but did not previously issue specific rules on AI. The growing coalitions of parents, teachers, and students who have been pushing for more restrictive AI policies in schools in both cities celebrated this week’s announcements. At the Los Angeles AI committee meeting where the ban was announced, parents with the advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens had to edit their prepared speeches in real time. “ We are asking our local institut — no, we're thanking our local institution,” said Sandra Martinez Roe, according to LAist. "Thank you, LAUSD for setting an example and knowing that your obligation is to do so.” The AI Moratorium (AIM) Coalition in NYC called the partial pause a “step in the right direction.” The coalition of organizations featuring teachers, students, and parents launched last fall has been pushing for a complete moratorium on classroom AI for two years. “We have been overall very pleased with the steps that the mayor and the chancellor have taken around AI in schools with this new policy,” Kyle DeAngelis, a 3rd grade NYC public school teacher in Harlem and member of the AIM Coalition through a rank-and-file caucus of the United Federation of Teachers, told Tech Policy Press. The coalition still has concerns with the policy they’d like to see addressed — including the creation of AI pilots in some schools, limited restrictions on staff use of AI, and a lack of metrics for evaluating tools — and hopes that a longer term policy is adopted through a democratic process that engages parents, teachers, and students alike. That new policy should include more restrictions for high schoolers, says Martina Meijer, a fourth grade teacher and member of the same UFT caucus as DeAngelis. “What we know about AI chatbots, what we know about teen mental health crises, what we know about the tendency of even adults to lean on these chatbots as a form of free therapy makes it really dangerous to ignore the needs of teenagers at this time,” she told Tech Policy Press. “I would just underscore that it's really important that this policy also include high school students because they are extremely vulnerable.” The nation’s two largest public school districts issuing such restrictions — albeit temporary and, in the case of New York, partial — on AI in classrooms is especially notable given that most school districts have previously shied away from forbidding use. The news is also indicative of bubbling grassroots opposition to AI, which has manifested itself in widespread data center backlash but is also coming up in, for example, surveys of office workers. Both districts now have a year to develop longer-term policies on AI in education. Rolling back restrictions like they did with the short-lived ChatGPT bans will almost certainly be met with organized opposition. “Over the last year, one of the things that has honestly really surprised me is just how quickly this particular movement has taken off,” DeAngelis said. “It’s reflective of what parents and teachers are seeing in their schools.”