New York City officials are treating AI as a developmental risk that requires firm limits, while some parents and advocacy groups argue the city’s one-year pause does not go far enough.

The Department of Education’s new policy, announced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, will take effect in the 2026–27 school year. It places a one-year moratorium on classroom AI use for roughly 600,000 students from 2-K through eighth grade — about two-thirds of the city’s public-school population.¹

The restrictions reach beyond student prompts and chatbots. Teachers will be barred from using AI to grade assignments; individual screens will not be allowed before third grade; and companion chatbots marketed as emotional or mental-health support will be prohibited in every grade. The department is also recommending a 45-minute daily screen-time ceiling for middle-school students.¹

Mamdani cast the move as a defense of conventional learning rather than a rejection of technology altogether. “Children need teachers and human connection in order to learn and grow,” he said, arguing that students must build skills with peers and “wrestle with tough problems on their own.”² His broader target was Silicon Valley’s pitch that AI in early education is unavoidable: “We do not see it that way.”²

The policy still leaves narrow routes for approved technology. Teachers may use AI for lesson planning, while exceptions can be granted for disability and multilingual-learning supports or computer-science programs. High-school students may use AI in specified situations and will receive AI-literacy instruction; a small, safety-vetted pilot is planned in a limited number of high-school classrooms.²

The announcement follows the city’s 2025–26 bell-to-bell ban on personal internet-enabled devices. But critics who had pressed for a two-year AI moratorium said the new guidelines were disappointing, exposing the central dispute: whether New York has moved too aggressively against classroom technology — or not nearly far enough.¹