Matthew Connelly, vice dean for AI initiatives at Columbia University, writes an alarmist op-ed in the New York Times denouncing the way artificial intelligence companies are taking over higher education, with the unwitting complicity of university administrators.
Aggressive strategies by AI companies: Connelly describes an arsenal of tactics. Anthropic imposes exorbitant fees for enterprise accounts while paying "campus ambassadors" to promote Claude, creating conflicts of interest when these ambassadors sit on student government. OpenAI developed a ChatGPT text detector that is 99.9% accurate but refused to make it available to educators, fearing that watermarking would push users toward competitors. During final exams, OpenAI offers ChatGPT Plus free to students, Google gives premium access for the entire year, and Perplexity runs sign-up competitions on campuses.
Emblematic case of drift: a Columbia student, Roy Lee, developed an AI tool to cheat on job interviews. Far from being sanctioned by the industry, Andreessen Horowitz admired his "audacious approach" and raised $15 million for his company Cluely, whose manifesto announces its intent to "cheat on everything."
Infrastructure ambitions: OpenAI aspires for its bots to become "part of the core infrastructure of higher education," from admissions to academic advising. Google invites students to upload their lecture recordings to NotebookLM, a practice Columbia prohibits without authorization. Universities have no access to the data their students and faculty feed into these systems.
Impact on learning: research shows that students using AI read less attentively, write with less precision and originality, and do not realize what they are losing. Professors report a notable decline in questions asked in class. The central paradox: the skills needed to harness AI's real potential — critical reading, analytical thinking, argumentative writing — are precisely those that passive AI use erodes.
Call to resistance: Connelly concludes with a military metaphor: wars can be lost before they are declared if defenders abandon strategic ground without a fight. For universities, that ground is human intelligence itself. He calls on educators to defend and advance human intelligence rather than be seduced by unbalanced partnerships with an industry whose interests fundamentally diverge from the educational mission.