New York City’s AI moratorium will ban student-facing generative AI tools for children in Years 2-K through eighth grade from the 2026-2027 school year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Wednesday, covering nearly 600,000 pupils in the country’s largest public school system.
The one-year pause, described by City Hall as the most expansive student-facing AI policy in the United States, also bans companion chatbots across every grade level.
Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, standing alongside Mamdani at the announcement, said the March policy that preceded Wednesday’s decision ‘missed the mark.’
New York City AI moratorium: what the policy covers
According to the NYC Official Announcement, the moratorium takes effect at the start of the 2026-2027 school year. Exceptions will be granted for assistive technology used by students with disabilities, multilingual learners, and pupils enrolled in career-readiness programmes, including computer science.
Mamdani, 34, said he does not use AI himself. ‘I have yet to see a study showing that AI is beneficial for students in elementary and middle school, with the exception, of course, of research sponsored by the very corporations that stand to profit,’ he said.
‘Kids need to learn to think for themselves, they need to work alongside their peers, they need to learn how to ask better questions, and they need to learn what it feels like to not know the answer,’ he added.
For high schoolers, AI will be taught, but within strict limits. ‘Whether we like it or not, our teenagers are growing up in an AI-saturated world,’ Mamdani said. ‘In no way, shape or form will AI replace student-teacher interaction.’
Advocates and opponents divided on the scope
The administration’s one-year pause falls short of what campaigners demanded. In April, more than 250 doctors, child development experts and advocacy organisations called for a five-year moratorium on generative AI in pre-K through 12 schools. A majority of the City Council subsequently signed a letter asking for a two-year pause, citing risks to student privacy and critical thinking.
Leonie Haimson of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy had said of Mamdani earlier this year: ‘He said he himself doesn’t use AI, which is good, but why is he foisting it on New York City public school students?’
Fairplay, the child advocacy group that led the April coalition, said the one-year moratorium was ‘a step in the right direction’ but ‘raises serious concerns.’ Campaign Director David Monahan, speaking on behalf of the AI Moratorium for NYC Schools coalition, said: ‘It’s not too late to heed their call’ for a two-year pause.
On the other side, more than 250 chief executives, including the heads of Microsoft, Adobe, Dell, AMD and IBM, signed an open letter through the nonprofit CSforAll‘s Unlock8 campaign calling for mandatory computer science and AI education in every US high school. ‘In the age of AI, we must prepare our children for the future, to be AI creators, not just consumers,’ the letter states.
Julie Samuels, president and chief executive of Tech:NYC, was quoted in the city’s press release. Citing a CBRE report showing New York now has more tech jobs than the Bay Area, she said the city should ‘expand this access beyond one hour per week in the future’ for high schoolers using AI career-readiness tools.
Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who has promoted Alpha School, a private network that condenses academic instruction into two hours a day using AI tutoring software, has called it ‘the first truly breakthrough innovation in K-12 education’ since KIPP Academy. Alpha, based at 180 Maiden Lane in Manhattan’s Financial District, charges close to $65,000 a year in tuition. Alpha claims its students rank in the top 1 to 2 per cent nationally, though as a private network it faces no requirement to report outcome data to the state, making the claims hard to independently verify.
Internal documents obtained by 404 Media showed the network’s AI-generated lesson content included poorly structured material and illogical multiple-choice questions, Futurism reported. A spokesperson for Alpha told Fortune the platform was built with input from learning scientists, including Carl Hendrick, a King’s College London PhD who has published on evidence-based teaching methods.
The full announcement confirmed that schools with approved exceptions for disabled pupils and multilingual learners must apply through the city’s exemption process before the moratorium takes effect at the start of the 2026-2027 school year.
