One of the things that I don't think the AI native people fall trapped to is that the AI native people understand what the capabilities are like today and they treat the AI in that very powerful way versus someone who was using AI tools in 2022. They sort of see it still as like an assistant. Maybe they're misjudging the capabilities. And so what we all need to do is we need to sort of think like the AI native person, someone who just grew up using AI from day one.

But then I've also spent time in places like Rwanda and India where people are AI native right some of the first technology they've been using outside of just you know cell phone and WhatsApp technology are AI tools and of course there's a lot of similarities but one of the things that I don't think the AI native people fall trapped to is that the AI native people understand what the capabilities are like today and they treat the AI in that very powerful way versus someone who was using AI tools in 2022 they sort of see it still as like an assistant in maybe they're misjudging the capabilities.

People often are saying, "Okay, what's the step-by-step playbook of how to do things?" That made sense last year. And I think as we're looking to where the technology is now, what we really need is to give more of this context to the AI and then let it do its thing. And in some ways, it is a social skill. It's not just a technical skill. Sure, early days of AI was how do you prompt it this way, but ultimately you have to treat this more as a colleague, as a collaborator. And so then it becomes more like a social skill.

One of the things that I think holds us all back is we give AI tools pretty simple problems when we could be giving them much more complex problems.

There was a study that Enthropic did recently, one of our research fellows, where they looked at it particularly with coding education and CS education. And what they did is they created two groups, both had to do some assignment, coding assignment. One of them could use AI tools, one group couldn't. And what they found, of course, as you may expect, is the the group that could use the the AI tools were able to, you know, finish the assignment much quicker. But what they then did is they had a separate assessment afterwards where they couldn't use AI at all in either group to assess their understanding of the concepts that they had just used in that assignment before. And what they found is that the group that didn't use AI tools actually performed 17% better. They understood the concepts better because they had sort of slogged through this work without AI and they really had to internalize it. And that's I think the warning for all of AI and education is that the more we use these tools, the more it raises questions of this like skill atrophy.

Now the good news with that particular study was that not all of them did worse. And actually the ones that were using the AI tools not in such a transactional way but more of in an inquiry way and they were probing and asking questions, they actually were able to perform well on the final assessment. How you use the AI tools really matters. It's not just that you're using them or you're not using them. It's the way in which you're engaging. What is your goal when you show up to this AI tool? Are you just trying to get the task done as quickly as possible? And we all fall trapped to that. Or are you really trying to maybe do the task, but also get better and smarter as you're doing it.

People often go to the AI tool just with a particular solution in mind and you ask a very particular question because you're trying to get that solution where really the best practice is probably to come with the problem not the solution and say this is the thing I'm wrestling with and you know maybe you know some potential solutions but actually when you just come into an AI bot with the particular solution it's going to give a very narrow answer around that versus if you come with a much more open-ended problem the AI models of today are actually pretty good at helping you wrestle with this problem in 2026, we can come with a hairier problem and really try to get that input from the AI tool.

My name is Drew Bent. I lead education at Anthropic. My whole career has been focused on tutoring. So my parents are educators. I grew up just loving learning and loving, you know, peer tutoring people at my school. Later I founded a tutoring nonprofit, became a high school math teacher, and now I'm working on AI tutors, trying to figure out what does great tutoring look like, and more importantly, how do we scale that up? a world-class education to everyone everywhere.

So I've known Salcon since I was a schooler when I first interned at Khan Academy. And Salcon before he created Khan Academy, he was doing one-on-one tutoring with his cousins over Skype. And so actually his initial vision with Khan Academy was how can I scale this type of tutoring to more people? But of course Khan Academy was sort of based on YouTube videos. And so in 2020 we started to wonder how else could we recreate this one-on-one tutoring experience with Salcon but make that available to everyone. And so that's why we built this peer-to-peer tutoring platform called Schoolhouse where anyone in the world log on and receive free peer-to-peer tutoring in subjects like math, science, test prep, and then also if you want to give back, you can go volunteer and be a tutor.

What I'm excited about in 2030, I'll sort of paint a picture of what I think this could look like. So, first of all, these AI tools are going to need to know a lot about your context. Let's say you're a student in school. They're not just going to be using some generic curriculum. They're going to know the context of your school's curriculum, your state curriculum, and they're going to be able to tie everything back to that.

Building AI agents is the fundamental skill that will define every professional's career for the next 30 years. It's a requirement. In the same way that knowing how to use spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel was a requirement for the last 40 years, knowing how to build AI agents is a requirement for the next 40 years.

You're going to just see it show up in Slack one day as as a co-orker. It's going to be showing up in schools. This is a whole type of different skill which is how do you not just interact with other humans productively, but how do you collaborate with an AI? And in some ways it is a social skill.

Claude code. This is, you know, Entropics coding agent. It was not meant for learning. And yet we've seen people use it to learn in very creative ways. Not things like coding, just general things, learning a new language, learning some economics concept. And what they'll do is, you know, they'll go into clawed code and they'll start to build this memory and this context about what they're learning, about who they are, about how they learn best. And so it ultimately becomes this coach.