Estonia rolls out OpenAI platform to 20,000 upper secondary students
estonia is rolling out a customized educational artificial intelligence platform across its upper secondary schools through a partnership with OpenAI, and around half of the country’s 20,000 upper secondary students are already using it. The rest are expected to join this summer, while vocational schools are due to follow next academic year.
Education and Research Minister Kristina Kallas is steering the effort and says schools should train students to use generative AI to their educational advantage. Estonia is also treating the rollout as a research project into how artificial intelligence affects learning.
Kristina Kallas on school AI
Kallas has framed the issue as a choice about how students learn, not whether they will encounter the technology. “If you regulate AI out of school, you’re risking significant cognitive decline because the students will be using it anyway,” Kallas said to POLITICO. She also said, “That is the wrong fight” when asked about focusing on detecting AI-assisted cheating.
Her position is that schools should not try to keep AI outside the classroom. “The challenge is not how to keep AI out,” Kallas said. “The challenge is how to put AI into the learning process so that it accelerates and enhances cognitive growth rather than replacing thinking.”
Estonia and OpenAI
The rollout is moving in stages. Around half of Estonia’s 20,000 upper secondary students are already on the platform, and the remainder are expected to join this summer. Vocational schools are scheduled to follow during the next academic year, extending the program beyond the current upper secondary pilot.
Estonia says student data entered into the education platform remains under Estonian control and cannot be used to train the model. That data rule is the main practical guardrail around a system that the government is introducing at national scale rather than as a small classroom experiment.
EU position due Tuesday
The timing also places Estonia ahead of a wider European policy line. Education ministers from the 27 EU countries are expected to adopt a position on Tuesday on the use of AI in education, and the expected EU position calls for an ethical, safe and human-centred approach.
Estonia’s approach is more forceful than the cautious mood that has largely centered on detecting AI-assisted cheating. Kallas compared AI with earlier classroom tools, saying, “We should think of it like a calculator,” and added, “If you don’t know your basic structure of knowledge, then you can’t develop critical thinking.” She also said, “You have to know when the Second World War started — 1939 — because some things you just have to know by heart.”
That leaves Estonia’s schools with a live test: whether a national AI platform can be folded into learning without pushing basic knowledge to the side. For students already on the system, the immediate change is practical and direct — classroom AI is no longer a side issue, but part of the official school setup.
