By Eli Chavez
Anthropic AI, the company behind the large-language model known as Claude, is partnering with Northeastern University, Champlain University and the London School of Economics to unveil its new offering: Claude for Education.
The partnership will provide students, faculty and staff at partnering institutions with full subscriptions to Claude. Anthropic said the new education-forward model differs from its traditional model through its new “learning mode.” When prompted with a question, the LLM goes through a Socratic questioning process, working with the user to achieve an answer through a series of questions rather than providing the answer upfront.
According to Jay Aslam, the head of AI at Northeastern, the university has already been working with faculty to understand the best ways to use AI in education. Aslam said the university wanted a “true partnership” to help transform higher education instead of a traditional vendor deal. Aslam said he hopes establishing the partnership will lead to the co-development of new educational offerings.
“Even before this partnership, we had been working diligently within the University to rethink how we would teach in the age of AI,” Aslam said. “This has evolved workshops across the colleges within the university, talking to faculty about what they’re doing, what’s working, what’s not working.”
The move into higher education comes from feedback Anthropic has received from its users, a majority of which are students, according to Steven Syverud, who works in strategic product management at Anthropic. As students and professors increasingly adopt AI in their workflows, Syverud said partnering with universities was a logical step.
“I think it’s an area where we’re just seeing a ton of uptake in usage already, and we believe that teaching and learning will be affected a lot by the changes in AI,” Syverud said. “We think the societal impacts are potentially quite large, and we want to partner with universities as they prepare for those changes.”
Anthropic isn’t alone in its push into the higher education space. OpenAI, one of Anthropic’s competitors, announced ChatGPT Edu, a university-focused version of its chatbot, in May 2024. After Anthropic announced on Wednesday, competitor OpenAI announced that it would make its premium subscription, ChatGPT Plus, free for all college students in Canada and the US through the end of May.
The push into higher education is part of a larger trend of faculty and students embracing AI as part of their workflows. Professors use LLMs to help make lesson plans, write syllabi, and create digital agents to help workshop ideas for their students.
As the partnership evolves, Anthropic will send representatives to Northeastern for interviews with students, faculty, and staff to refine a better product based on first-hand feedback.
“Our goal is not just to sign a contract; it’s to be deep partners and have adoption that the university community is happy with,” Syverud said. “As part of that, we hope that Northeastern can help inform and shape what features we build in Claude for Education.”