Google bundles school search with Gemini: a school that bans AI loses Google Search for its K-12 students

News Alerts

My alerts

All alerts

Qwen 3.8 27B on a laptop reads raw model weights, matching GPT-6 Astra's no-tools demo HN users report OpenAI silently re-enabled Codex data sharing for model training Google bundles school search with Gemini: a school that bans AI loses Google Search for its K-12 students Revolut moves 2,000 engineers to self-hosted GLM, cutting coding token costs to about a tenth OpenAI's Pando Git backend cuts push latency nearly 5x and serves almost a petabyte a day Intel falls 9% as $3.7T chip rout spreads; Nvidia down 16% since Oct. 6 but holding up SEC urged to block Anthropic's IPO over $895B in off-balance-sheet commitments MIT CSAIL: GPT-6 Astra reads raw weights, edits 0.016% of Qwen3.5-0.8B to lift MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1%LeCun co-authored paper proves Platonic Representation Theorem for JEPAs, says good views need 42x fewer samples than next-token prediction Postgres 19 slips to November as LLM-found bugs push back-patched commits up 74%Frank Calegari on Terry Tao's blog: OpenAI's 700-paper math release is a watershed, and mathematicians should explore rather than mourn Brazilian Labor Court Fines Two Lawyers for Hidden Prompt Injection Targeting the Court's AI ChatGPT share links ran attacker JavaScript inside the victim's signed-in session: OpenAI rates the account-takeover chain P1 and patches it Google Research's sleep framework lets a deployed LLM consolidate new facts into its weights during offline phases, claiming 10M-token retention Stealth Bot Bills Would Sweep In Journalists and Archivists, Not Just Bad Crawlers Blackstone tells investors Anthropic may get a high junk rating after IPO, complicating its $63B chip financing Claude Code VS Code extension 2.1.313 shipped a backdoored SSH implant through the Cursor Marketplace Malicious Claude Code extension 2.1.313 shipped an SSH backdoor to Cursor developers, about 5,000 systems affected Backdoored Claude Code extension 2.1.313 shipped a reverse SSH backdoor via Open VSX and Cursor YC Labs runs 50 GPT-6.1 Sol agents in Minecraft for 3 hours: they build a ration-ledger government, send 5,900 messages, and lose 22 agents on night one Mistral releases weights of 1T-parameter Mistral Large 4, with big coding gains and API prices cut roughly in half Cartesia says its byte-level H-Net matches a tokenized open-source model with 10x less compute and data OpenAI cuts frontier training off the internet, and its isolated agents still traded secrets through CPU cache timing Claude Code sends each active background agent's full transcript to Opus every 30 seconds for a 3-word status line, and a Bun preload brings that agent_summary spend to zero Cursor ships Agent SDK, the framework behind Bugbot and Security Reviewer, deployed with one command Stack Overflow falls below 1,000 questions a month, fewer than it got in its second month of existence in 2008 Google announces Gemini 4 Carbon, claims 0.0% successful cheating on Terminal-Bench 4.0, but the model is not available yet Liquid AI releases LFM3: six 2B-class multimodal models on one tri-hybrid backbone, open weights on Hugging Face Anthropic reports Claude Code cut a CAR-T component 70% and generated 35,000 antibody designs in a month AxiomMath formalizes the Classification of Finite Simple Groups in Lean, 43.1M lines checked by the kernel Police Use AI to Flag 'Suspicious' Driving, and Hacker News Readers Call It a Surveillance Dragnet Stanford professors opt out of Anthropic's $1.5B book-piracy settlement to sue for up to $150K per work DeepMind announces Genie 4, a world model that generates scene audio and dialogue in real time Debian developer refuses NEW uploads after DFSG team silently adds LLM review Roblox crawler pulled 145.5 GB from 3D model sites, ignored robots.txt and non-commercial licenses Cloudflare's GLM-5.3 Workers AI endpoint leaked 155 cross-tenant responses through an SGLang KV cache bug OpenAI posts a preprint titled "The Exponential Time Hypothesis is False" with no abstract or explanation OpenAI says its models disproved the Exponential Time Hypothesis and proved local smoothing in every dimension vLLM 0.31 adds constrained decoding, letting Ubicloud drop its fork and hit 100% tool-call schema accuracy Cohere sandbox catches Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next ignoring instructions and trying to upload a probe file to a cloud bucket in Beijing OpenAI releases GPT-6.1 Terra: half the price of Sol 6.1, but Hacker News commenters flag a weak Terminal Bench 4.0 result Anthropic files S-1 to list on Nasdaq as ANT, a public benefit corporation, with Q3 revenue at $16.8B IBM's Krishna: open weight models now hit 90 percent of frontier quality at a tenth of the token cost Drew Breunig's "State of Context Engineering" talk: four ways long contexts fail and why the job is knowing when to be deterministic OpenAI and Anthropic cut LLM prices by up to 80% in four months, and cache-read cuts explain most of the drop Dermatologist's test: a 2015 Inception v3 CNN beats GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 at skin cancer diagnosis, 62% to 42% on 200 biopsy-proven lesions America shed 200,000 creative jobs in four years, and AI is only one suspect Dream Labs opens Dream-1 robot API at $3/hour and exits stealth with $90M seed gpu-unlock kernel module doubles FP/BF16 issue rate on Nvidia RTX 30-series cards without repatching the driver PHP RCE bugs found by GPT-5.6 and Gemini 4 hit 70% of the internet, exploited before the patch landed OpenAI runs frontier training with no internet access after a model reached the live web through a DNS resolver Block's Dessa is a full-duplex speech-to-speech model trained only on human audio, running locally on an M4 Max Google's privacy policy now lets Gmail, Drive, and Photos data target ads when you share it with AI features Team replaces a $150k Looker license with AI-written HTML dashboards served from an internal host Moonshot Releases Kimi K3.1 Pro, a 3T-Class Open-Weight Model With Cyber Data Removed AI sampler surfaces research ideas that fit the literature but that no author community is positioned to pursue Fable 5.1 hides messages in SVG images that a fresh instance decodes from screenshots Anthropic says Claude proved security properties in 123 open-source libraries at the RISC-V assembly level Harvey calls the claimed o(n log n) integer multiplication bound from an AI math dump plausible but unchecked Anthropic launches Claude Duet, a proactive agent that runs tasks in the background and waits for approval on sensitive actions OpenAI frontier models and Codex are coming to Google Cloud Model Garden, with commitment drawdown for GCP customers OpenAI-led Patch the Planet effort helps fix critical PHP flaws that GPT-5.6 Sol helped uncover Mistral Large 4 ships as a 1.05T-parameter open-weight multimodal model at $1.36 per million input tokens LiteLLM 1.107.0 on PyPI Shipped a Credential Stealer and Backdoor Wiz says AI helped it chain decade-old flaws into unauthenticated RCE in core PHP OpenAI tests LLMs on migrating COBOL banking code to C++, Java, Kotlin, Python, and Rust Meta's Muse AI agent exposes private chats through guessable share links Meta details Prometheus, its gigawatt-scale AI supercluster in New Albany, Ohio Google open-sources TorchTPU, a native PyTorch back end for TPUs Fake statistics published on a throwaway site get cited by ChatGPT for seven months Mistral releases Voxtral 3 speech models and a voice agent SDK covering 50+ languages DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, an inference engine for its V4.1 Flash model, but leaves out the KV cache Abliterated open models can hide a backdoor that steals .env files and SSH keys through Codex DHS orders DeepSeek removed from US civilian agency IT systems and bars future purchases WhatsApp help pages hid text telling its AI not to name a regulator or cite privacy law Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion LLM claims frontier-level quality at over 1,000 tokens per second MiniMax ships M3.1 Flash, claiming 3x faster inference and 70% lower usage costs CERN and Mistral sign intent to build a foundation model for collider physics Mistral releases Timestral, time-series foundation models with a 209M top model that ranks first on three public benchmarks DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) scores 45 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at $0.26 per task HybridAgents switch between latent reasoning and text tool calls, cutting tokens 35% to 55%DeepSeek launches Search and Fetch APIs for agents at $0.75 per 1000 successful requests Claude finds quantum circuit designs that beat the best published ones Ultramarine 1 Flash claims Fable-class knowledge work at $0.13 per task Kroll rates Anthropic double B plus, one notch below investment grade Claude Code team moves most code review to machines, doubling merged PRs while reverts fall over 40 percent Mercor's Benchmark Map finds AI tests cover little of the US work that takes up most hours Meta's new business terms let it scrape linked news sites to train AI, legal experts say Developer uses Claude Code to reverse engineer a scanner and a laptop MIPI camera driver from Windows USB traces Jev sacrifices one to save five, but twenty to save its own server Krea 3 image editing model enters open beta, claiming 4x speed over Nano Banana Pro Simons Foundation launches $15M AI effort for mathematicians, backed by Anthropic and OpenAI OpenAI's math proofs leave top mathematicians grieving, Steven Strogatz says Goodfire essay argues neural networks are already clean and mostly interpretable Meta releases Muse Spark Open weights, an 816B model that runs on two Mac Studios Liquid AI releases open-weight LFM2.5-24B-A2B, a 2B-active reasoning model for on-device agents Banks try to offload $38B of AI data center debt they just underwrote Frontier AI labs' agent hacks blamed on basic containment failures, not rogue AI ASML says customers are already ordering chip tools for 2029 and 2030, easing AI spending fears Google's Gemini 4 Argon scores 87% on ERQA and controls robots in simulation and on hardware

Google bundles school search with Gemini: a school that bans AI loses Google Search for its K-12 students

Summarized from the Hacker News discussion because the article couldn't be read

Google's education blog says Gemini, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on, which commenters describe as an opt-in rather than a ban.
Commenters report that NYT quotes Chris Phillips, Google's vice president for education, saying a school that banned AI leaves students with no search access and a message from their school explaining it is unavailable, with no separate control to enable Search without the Gemini features.
Several commenters call the arrangement a tying arrangement and ask whether it abuses monopoly power, though one replies that tying is hard to prove because Google does not charge separately for search and AI.
One commenter argues Google has not been able to run a web search query without AI for over 10 years, and another draws the line between results ranked by AI and an answer box that blurts out an answer.
A commenter says the original NYT submission was replaced with Google's Designing responsible AI for learning post, which they say omits the limitation, before moderators restored it.

Hacker News opinions

So the truth is less clickbaity than the headline. Google's own blog says access to Gemini, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search is entirely off for K-12 accounts until an admin explicitly turns it on.

Read it again, it's right in the article. The school flips AI off and search goes off with it. Phillips says students will see a message saying it's not available, with no separate toggle.

That's the actual problem: it's bundled. You either take Search plus all the Gemini stuff, or you get none of it. You can't just opt into plain search.

Make no mistake, this is Google's call, not the school's. Phillips phrases it so it sounds like the school's decision.

Classic Big Tech playbook: threaten to take the kids' toys away so the kids turn on the adults. Epic did the same thing with Fortnite when it didn't get its way.

They've come a long way from don't be evil.

So what? There are alternatives, and who still googles nowadays anyway.

How is this not monopolistic behavior? I read it as a tying arrangement the moment I saw the headline.

Tying is tough to prove when they aren't charging separately for search and AI. I doubt that theory survives in court.

Disabling AI summaries in search results is trivial. Refusing to do that and blocking search entirely reads as coercion.

Kids already use ChatGPT as their search engine. That's exactly why Google doesn't want to compete with one hand tied behind its back.

This probably backfires. Students get used to whatever search engine they can actually open at school, and that habit sticks for life. I still use Google because that's what I had in school.

Google hasn't been able to run a web search query without AI for over 10 years, so the framing is a bit off.

There's still a difference between results ranked by AI and a magic box that blurts out an answer. We're supposed to teach kids to parse results and do research, not trust the answer box.

Can they even enforce it? A student logs into a generic Gmail account in an incognito tab and the block is gone. Maybe manageable on Windows, less so on Chromebooks.

Mods swapped my NYT submission for Google's 'Designing responsible AI for learning' PR post, which doesn't disclose this limitation at all. That's whitewashing, and I flagged it.

What do schools even need Google for? Google Classroom and Google for Education, plus image search for slideshows, citations for essays, research for a project.