Report: Big Tech Courts Teachers Like Big Pharma

The New York Times reported Sunday that Microsoft, Google and other technology giants have used their money and reach to shape nearly every step of what it calls the education supply chain — including training the teachers who use their products.

The report, by Times technology reporter Natasha Singer, is an adapted excerpt from her book "Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools," published by W.W. Norton & Company.

Its central comparison: corporate teacher workshops look a lot like the seminars drug companies run for doctors.

What The Reporting Found

Singer describes an afternoon in the summer of 2025 when representatives from Microsoft met roughly 200 teachers at a conference hall in downtown Manhattan, at the headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers. The subject was artificial intelligence chatbots.

The Microsoft team presented its Copilot chatbot and asked the teachers to practice using it for tasks such as generating emails to parents and customizing lesson plans, according to the report. Microsoft instructors also screened an AI explainer video produced by the company's Minecraft Education division, an animated clip built around the world-building game and featuring a narrator and a Minecraft duck.

One of the Microsoft workshop leaders told the teachers that even if some schoolchildren were not old enough to use AI, they could at least start learning about it, Singer writes.

She reports observing similar workshops for teachers and students funded or led by Amazon, Apple, Meta, OpenAI and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

Singer's argument is that the sessions cut both ways. They can help teachers keep current on new software, she writes, but they can also double as marketing — letting some of the largest corporations on the planet give administrators, teachers and students a sanitized view of industry practices and product risks.

Her comparison is explicit: many parents would object if Exxon Mobil wrote their children's environmental science curriculum, or if Purdue Pharma trained their biology teachers. Over the last decade, she writes, schools have often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with few questions asked.