On campuses, GenAI companies brand themselves as academic friends, not foes

Academic cheating is an age-old concern. But while students used to peek at classmates’ Scantron sheets to see which bubbles were filled in, there are new tools that some say could supercharge cheating: generative AI.

That’s not stopping gen AI brands from marketing themselves to not just college students but also faculty this school year. As the fall semester kicks off, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing their tools as vehicles to promote learning rather than impede it and pitching themselves as educational collaborators to colleges and universities, many of which are in the midst of creating policies to address GenAI use.

At the same time, some of the players in the AI race are targeting students more directly through campus clubs and ambassadorships to get them further integrated with their brands.

“This year, it really has just exploded,” Evan Levine, senior director of IT services and support at Duke University’s Office of Information Technology, told Marketing Brew. “There’s so many tools and offerings, and there’s very little understanding of what the differences are, or how to use these things effectively, or what that means…This summer, we were faced with a major educational challenge…We want people to come back [in the fall] to this amazing suite of tools and services and ways of doing things that they didn’t necessarily have before, but also, how on Earth are they going to know how to use them?”

Corner the market

To understand how GenAI companies are marketing themselves to colleges and students, it’s helpful to understand the needs they say they’re aiming to address. Ahead of the school year, Duke held four GenAI workshops to help educate students on how to use related tools earlier this summer, Levine told Marketing Brew. The university generally considers “good attendance” to its tech workshops to be between 20 to 30 students, Levine said; those four workshops brought in between 700 and 800 students.

For some universities, welcoming AI brands onto campus is an acknowledgement of the inevitable.

“There’s no way we can really completely abandon [GenAI] or…punish students for using it,” Sabit Ekin, associate professor and director of the Generative AI Literacy Initiative at Texas A&M’s Institute of Data Science, told Marketing Brew. “They will be using it.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT product is one of the most widely used GenAI products by students, with ChatGPT usage hitting a peak of 97.4 billion tokens on May 27 (each token represents about four English characters, according to the company), around the time of finals season for students, according to data released from the AI platform OpenRouter and reported by Futurism last month.

Amid student interest in understanding the tools, GenAI companies are pitching themselves to schools as collaborators to promote learning. OpenAI, which has struck up relationships with both Texas A&M and Duke, has sought to brand its tools as useful for enhancing education. Its NextGenAI consortium, a group designed “to support students, educators, and researchers advancing the frontiers of knowledge,” includes 15 research institutions, including Texas A&M, and Duke, through which it says it is providing $50 million in research grants, funding, and API access. In June, the company held a roundtable in New York, where academics discussed AI in education.

AI is “a fast-growing, fast-paced thing in general,” Levine said. “All these companies are relatively new, and then higher education is a different type of market [with] different types of requirements and demands.”

Bots on the ground

Another major player in the GenAI space, Anthropic, is taking a student-centric approach to promote its GenAI product Claude to students. In April, the company rolled out Claude for Education, a version customized specifically for higher education, Greg Feingold, who oversees community programs at Anthropic, told Marketing Brew.

Feingold said the students he speaks to “are already very aware that if they use AI to cut corners, it’s not going to be beneficial to their education in the long run,” and that they seem invested in learning “how to use AI thoughtfully.” To that end, the company is seeking out college students to create on-campus “Claude Builder Clubs,” which will organize educational workshops and run hackathons, among other undertakings. In mid-August, Georgia Tech inaugurated the first on-campus Claude Builder Club, and the program is now active at more than 50 universities, including UNC Chapel Hill and Johns Hopkins.

To make further inroads on campuses, Anthropic is also expanding its student ambassador program. Ambassadors represent Claude to student organizations and faculty departments while hosting activations and other events on campus.

Through the programs, Anthropic is aiming to reframe and engage with concerns faculty or students might have about GenAI use in academic settings, Feingold said. As part of a partnership with the London School of Economics that includes free student access to Claude for Education, which became active in May, Anthropic hosted a roundtable with faculty and students to discuss concerns with GenAI use in schools.

“We definitely don’t shy away from exploring the potential concerns of how AI could be used negatively in education,” Feingold said. “In fact, we make it a big part of our programming to explore the issues and potential solutions.”