Many school districts spent the last academic year trying to seal students off from artificial intelligence. Now, they’re racing to establish AI-friendly classrooms as a new school year kicks off. They’ve crafted rules for AI use among students and trained teachers on how to fuse the technology into daily learning. The reason for the dramatic shift: a realization that it’s better to harness the rapidly evolving technology than futilely attempt to insulate against it. Now, state by state, more school leaders are setting rules around acceptable use and preaching the benefits of the emergent technology while Washington weighs national AI regulations for K-12 classrooms. Administrators in the heart of Silicon Valley have been developing rules that would allow for AI use only when teachers explicitly encourage it and mandate that students cite ChatGPT use in their work. The growing embrace of AI technology by educators doesn’t mean that they’re ignoring concerns about cheating. “There are some companies right now that claim that they can detect AI,” said Stanford University education researcher H. Alix Gallagher in an interview. “I would recommend suspicion about the promises of catching cheating. And anything that says we can preserve the status quo is, I think, untrue.” Federal officials and national education groups are also wrestling with how to strike a balance between embracing AI’s potential and protecting academic rigor and student privacy.