The Growing Call to Rein in AFT’s Embrace of AI

Here’s how TruthDig contributor, Nolan Higdon, summed up Weingarten’s crucial role in bringing unsafe AI technology into teacher rooms and student classrooms:

. . . .Big Tech’s push into education isn’t about learning. It’s about market capture. Schools offer a captive, young audience — ready to be mined for data, shaped into obedient users and sold to advertisers. These AI companies don’t want to “teach students about AI.” They want to define AI for them — framing it as inevitable, neutral and beneficial. They certainly won’t highlight its limitations, dangers or environmental toll.

They won’t teach that AI reflects the biases of its creators. They won’t teach that “AI” today is little more than a marketing label for probabilistic autocomplete systems. They won’t highlight examples like xAI’s Grok promoting Hitler rhetoric, or how AI routinely fails basic logical reasoning. And they won’t teach students how algorithmic systems entrench inequality or why surveillance-based models are fundamentally at odds with democratic education.

As shocking as AFT’s sellout is, it’s not the first time AFT President Randi Weingarten, who spent about three years as a full-time teacher, collectively, in her career, has cozied up to corporate power. Under her leadership, AFT has backed NewsGuard, a military-industrial-adjacent “news literacy” tool, and co-hosted an AI conference between AFT and Microsoft that turned out to be a Big Tech trade show. I was there. It wasn’t education — it was marketing.

This latest deal couldn’t have happened without her. As Bahat told Time magazine,“The critical thing here is that it was led by a worker organization. Randi and the AFT really drove this process.”

Let’s be clear: Any union that signs off on corporate control of the classroom isn’t defending education — it’s selling it off. It’s not just shortsighted. It’s reckless. It undermines labor. It undermines public education. And it hands over power to some of the most anti-worker, anti-democratic corporations in existence. If the AFT stays on this path, it won’t just become irrelevant — it will forfeit the right to call itself a labor union. We can’t build a just society by aligning with the very forces hollowing it out.