Google’s new school AI policy landed amid mounting anxiety over chatbots in classrooms. On Tuesday, the company said Gemini and related tools would be off by default for K-12 student accounts, leaving administrators to decide what to enable.¹

The trouble was Search. Google education vice president Chris Phillips said that “Search and AI are deeply integrated,” meaning schools that decline the AI package would not provide students access to Search.² For educators worried that AI summaries let pupils skip the work of finding and weighing information, that sounded less like local control than a forced trade-off.

Political criticism followed quickly. Sen. Bernie Sanders called the arrangement “extortion,” while New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani argued that Google was using monopoly power to push AI into public schools. Former FTC Chair Lina Khan likewise warned of “the danger of allowing an unregulated monopolist to control an essential service.”³

Google then sought to narrow the interpretation. It said schools can enable Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Search separately, and stressed that the products are off by default. The company also said AI Mode and AI Overviews in school Search would be redesigned to offer step-by-step guidance rather than quick answers.⁴

That clarification resolves one point: a district can keep Search active while disabling the standalone Gemini apps. But it does not deliver the cleaner option many educators want. Under Google’s model, choosing Search still means choosing its built-in AI features—or turning Search off entirely. As one account of the policy put it, schools may gain more power to block AI across Google’s services, but they do not gain “AI-free search.”²

For districts heavily reliant on Chromebooks and Google’s web index, switching providers is hardly frictionless. The immediate fight, then, is not over whether schools can say no to AI. It is over whether Google should make them sacrifice ordinary web search to do it.