Something interesting happened this month. Microsoft, together with the American Federation of Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers, announced a National AI Safety and Privacy Standard for schools. Unlike the pile of responsible-use frameworks that appeared after 2023, this one is built to be legally enforceable through contracts, and schools are invited to fold it into their Microsoft agreements. Alongside it, Microsoft AI published a Humanist AI Code of Conduct about keeping AI under meaningful human control. Both are good. That is what makes this worth thinking about carefully.
The commitments themselves are hard to argue with
No training on student or educator data. Limits on collection and reuse. Human oversight for decisions that carry real consequences. Clearer information for families about how the systems work. We agree with all of it. We built our own product around most of it. If these become the baseline expectations in education procurement, the sector is better off than it is today, where every district negotiates the same privacy conversation from scratch with every new vendor.
The commitments are sound. Enforceable through contracts is a real step forward.
Now the uncomfortable part
Auditable data flows. Security documentation. Contractual retention limits. Human-review systems. Youth-safety testing. Every one of those is reasonable. Together they are also a wall. Microsoft can absorb that cost without noticing. A fifteen-person company building something genuinely new cannot, not easily. Stronger rules can improve a market and entrench the biggest player in it at the same time, and both of those things can be true without anyone acting in bad faith. The standard does not need to say buy Microsoft. It only needs safety to be defined partly in terms of capabilities that Microsoft already happens to have.
Why this is happening now
Look at the board. Google has enormous distribution through Classroom, Workspace and Chromebooks, and just signed a statewide deal covering over a million students in Missouri. OpenAI is expanding through district partnerships and standardised multi-state privacy agreements. Microsoft needs a position that is not about whether its assistant writes a marginally better lesson plan, because very few people believe that is where the difference lies. The AI company you can trust with children is a much stronger place to stand. It is also, conveniently, a position that rewards scale.
What this means if you are a Dutch school
Almost none of it applies to you directly. These are American agreements, negotiated with American unions, under American law. Your obligations come from the AVG and from Dutch procurement practice, and no US standard discharges them. What you can take from it is the shape of the questions. Is the commitment contractual or is it a blog post. Does it cover the model provider underneath the vendor, or only the vendor. Who reviews the decisions that matter. What can a parent actually find out. Those questions travel. The document does not.
Where we sit
We are one of the small companies that a higher compliance bar makes life harder for. We are also completely in favour of the bar. Our answer is to be the kind of company that can meet it on its own terms rather than through someone else's contract. European models, European hosting, no training on school data, a teacher who can always overrule the system, export built in from the start. Not because a standard tells us to, but because we would rather be able to answer the question ourselves when a school asks it. The thing worth watching over the next year is not whether these standards get adopted. It is who is still allowed in the room once they are.
Take these with you
- 1The commitments are sound. Enforceable through contracts is a real step forward.
- 2The same rules that raise the floor also raise the cost of entry.
- 3None of it is legally relevant to a Dutch school. The questions are, the paperwork is not.
- 4Ask whether a safety promise is in the contract or on a webpage.
- 5Watch who is still in the market once the standards settle.
