Schools are catching on to Big Tech’s playbook

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"Coding Kids," by New York Times education technology reporter Natasha Singer, details how Apple, Google, and Microsoft spent 15 years embedding their products and curricula into schools under the banner of preparing students for tech jobs. Schools adopted company-designed courses built around proprietary tools — Apple's Swift, Microsoft's Minecraft — while Google distributed Chromebooks widely across districts, creating platform dependency and pipelines of future consumers and workers. Now, AI companies are pitching schools with nearly identical arguments: AI literacy is essential, jobs depend on it, and here's free curriculum to get started. Singer draws a direct parallel to the coding wave, warning against "collective amnesia" — her concern is that the structural incentives that made Big Tech's education expansion successful are operating again. Singer is cautiously optimistic that educators show more scrutiny toward AI curriculum offers today than they did toward coding ones a decade ago. However, the article — framed as a podcast companion piece — doesn't provide concrete data: no enrollment numbers, no specific AI company programs named, no regulatory actions cited. The argument is conceptual and largely qualitative. For practitioners watching AI's expansion into education, the framing is useful context: the same playbook of free resources, credibility transfer, and future customer creation is in motion again, and institutional resistance may be higher this cycle.