How Developers Are Making AI Your Kid’s Third Parent In The Classroom: The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI Admit AI is Like a Parent Nobody Can Resist, While Teachers Unions Support Big Tech’s Rule

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How Developers Are Making AI Your Kid’s Third Parent In The Classroom

The CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI admit AI is like a parent nobody can resist, while teachers unions support Big Tech’s rule.

Under Roman law a father held a legal power called patria potestas, or “total ownership,” of his children. He could sell them, deny them property, or abandon a newborn on a hillside. The child was not a person but property under the law. What a surprise then that the so-called “paternalistic” Apostle Paul upended five centuries of that system in a single verse when he wrote “Fathers do not exasperate your children; instead bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). Roman law already demanded obedience to the father under pater familias. So Paul’s revolutionary challenge to the system was not to challenge obedience, but rather to tell the man holding absolute power he had a duty to the best interests of the child rather than himself.

Paul’s words to the Ephesians shaped Western family law for two millennia, including modern American case law (see Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 1925; Wisconsin v. Yoder, 1972). But today a different authority has moved into the space between parent and child; not a patriarch but an “aithority” — an algorithm built by the largest technology corporations on earth and dropped into American classrooms through a partnership with the teachers unions. Nobody sent a permission slip home.

The scale of “the aithority” in schools is already exasperating. In late 2025, Google announced its Gemini AI education tools had reached more than 10 million students across more than 1,000 U.S. institutions. The company rolled out more than 150 new AI features in a single year, trained more than 1 million educators for free, and embedded AI tutoring modules directly into Google Classroom. Separately, Google invested $1 billion in college-level AI integration. In June 2025 the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the second-largest teachers union in the country, announced a partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic to accelerate AI adoption in classrooms nationwide. That deal was negotiated between union leadership and three of the most powerful AI companies on earth. Parents were not at the table.

AI’s Values

In AI systems, “features” are not merely technical upgrades. They are a moral takeover, and the people building the technology know it.  

In January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 20,000-word essay called “The Adolescence of Technology,” in which he called AI such a “glittering prize” that it is “very difficult for human civilization to impose any restraints on it at all.” He described Anthropic’s approach to controlling its Claude AI through what the company calls Constitutional AI, where developers write a “central document of values” the model reads to form its identity. And if your values are not aligned with pater artificialis Siliconus, Amodei boasts “we can also selectively activate features in a way that alters behavior.” He says the goal is to teach the model “a concrete archetype of what it means to be a good AI” and compared the process to a “letter from a deceased parent sealed until adulthood.”

Read that again. The developers are the parents. The AI models are the adolescents. The actual parents of actual children are excluded from the lineage entirely. This is the new Silicon pater familias. A small group of engineers in San Francisco writes a constitution that shapes how an AI thinks about morality, identity, and the good life. That AI then sits with your child several hours a day in a public-school classroom. The child did not choose it. You did not approve it. But the developers decided what “best interests” and values the model would carry into that conversation and they did so using a framework Amodei himself compares to parenting. 

But to be fair, Amodei is not the only AI morality engineer in the new empire. In 2025 the teacher unions’ other darling, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, basically called ChatGPT a third parent on The Late Show with Jimmy Fallon, admitting he relies on it to manage the anxieties of raising his own surrogate child, saying “I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.” In contrast to Altman’s idealized helpful third parent, the supposed “Godfather of AI” and Nobel Laureate Geoffrey Hinton warns that with the coming model upgrades, humans will soon be “like three-year-olds” compared to AI, noting only one biological example of a less intelligent being successfully controlling a more intelligent one: a baby and its mother.

This is not the first time a “best interests” framework has been used to justify displacing parental authority at scale. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) established a model where state-defined interests could override the family unit. Conservative critics from the Heritage Foundation to the Home School Legal Defense Association warned for decades that the UNCRC was an effort to remove children from their religious and family contexts. The United States never ratified it. Now Silicon Valley has effectively digitized the same ambition. The AI constitution acts as a new kind of treaty, one that bypasses local communities and parental sovereignty entirely and that no legislature voted on.

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