The next phase of OpenAI’s Education for Countries

The next phase of OpenAI’s Education for Countries

At the Education World Forum in London, OpenAI shares early learnings from Education for Countries and welcomes Singapore to the program.

A new era of agentic AI is here. With more than 900 million people using ChatGPT each week, and more than 4 million using Codex, agents have the potential to place far greater creative, intellectual, and technical power in the hands of every student - helping young people turn ideas into action, pursue ambitions that once felt out of reach, and become the creators and builders of what comes next. OpenAI cares deeply about how AI affects cognition, learning, and development over time; as these tools advance rapidly, responsible deployment cannot be an afterthought. It requires large-scale, government-led research partnerships that tailor AI to educational contexts in close partnership with educators, build confidence in responsible adoption, and create the evidence base for safe and effective use.

This is the model OpenAI has pioneered through Education for Countries, launched at Davos earlier this year. Our first cohort brings together a community of countries united by a shared ambition: to improve learning outcomes and unlock economic opportunity. Estonia, Greece, Italy’s CRUI, Slovakia, Trinidad & Tobago, Kazakhstan, the UAE, and Jordan are now advancing this work across three core pillars:

**Research-driven deployment:**Using OpenAI’s Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite, deployments begin as research partnerships that help governments, educators, and OpenAI understand AI’s impact on learners, adapt the technology, and build shared evidence on what works.**Localized AI tools for learning:**System-wide access to secure, compliant, and private ChatGPT, Codex, and OpenAI’s API platform, tailored to teaching and learning.**Teacher training and enablement:**AI literacy, professional development, and certifications that help educators use these tools confidently and responsibly.

Estonia is a digital pioneer, with one of the world’s strongest education systems and a thriving startup ecosystem. Through the AI Leap Foundation, Estonia’s Ministry of Education is leading a nationwide, research-driven ChatGPT Edu deployment: localising the experience for schools, equipping educators, and building the foundations for responsible adoption. ChatGPT Edu now reaches over 20,000 students and 4,600 teachers.

The next phase is focused on localising the tools, building sovereign capability, and measuring real-world impact. OpenAI is collaborating with AI Leap, the University of Tartu, and Stanford to understand how AI affects learning for more than 20,000 students in real classroom settings - findings we are committed to sharing publicly. Alongside this research, we are investing in teacher enablement and upskilling, recognising that educators are the cornerstone of responsible classroom adoption. That work spans professional learning communities and builder events like the recent Presidential Codex Hackathon, where more than 150 participants formed roughly 30 OpenAI-mentored teams to create classroom tools, including a Maths Feedback Coach and an AI STEM Tutor.

"AI Leap and OpenAI have brought global AI expertise into the Estonian education system while also researching how these tools influence learning, thinking, and long-term skill development. We believe the next generation of AI — including agents and tools like Codex — can support more personalized and proactive learning while still strengthening critical thinking, independent learning, and the role of teachers. We’re excited to help develop approaches that other education systems can build on."

Across the first cohort, we are already seeing concrete signals of positive impact:

• In Jordan, over 1 million students and over 100,000 teachers have engaged AI Education Assistant, Siraj, as part of a broader national initiative led by the National Council for Future Technology to deploy AI-powered tools that drive meaningful improvements across public services.
• In Greece, the OpenAI for Greece AI Startup Accelerator selected 21 AI-native startups from 240 applications, to cultivate the next generation of founders, keep talent building at home, and turn national ambition into new companies and ideas.
• In Kazakhstan, a national ChatGPT Edu deployment across all 20 regions has seen over 84,000 educators complete AI-readiness training. 9 in 10 of educators surveyed said ChatGPT Edu is useful for work and 44,000 active educators sent 1.5 million prompts in the first month.
• In Slovakia, early university survey results show more than 9 in 10 educators report higher productivity, saving around 5 hours per week. A Ministry of Education team used Workspace Agents to draft revised teacher professional standards linked to the national AI competency framework, reducing months of work to a matter of hours.

Singapore’s education system is among the world’s best, and young Singaporeans are already highly active AI users. Around 43% of ChatGPT usage by 18–24 year olds is tied to learning and education. The next step is helping students and educators use AI to support teaching, build AI literacy, improve learning outcomes, and prepare young people for the future workforce.

Through OpenAI for Singapore, we are delighted to be working with Singapore's Ministry of Education (MOE), which has been exploring a variety of AI tools from different partners to meaningfully support teaching and learning. OpenAI is supporting use cases built by the MOE and GovTech teams to support personalized learning, for example, helping our students learn mother tongue languages more interactively. We’re also supporting educators through practical workshops and hands-on sessions as a Singapore-specific chapter of the OpenAI Academy, and Codex for Teachers hackathons, to ensure AI's use is developed in a teacher-driven approach built on responsible, equitable foundations.

As Education for Countries evolves, we continue to support governments in moving beyond tool access and toward evidence-based deployments - designed with learning scientists, researchers, measuring impact over time, and sharing what we learn so governments can scale what works.

To support our teacher-first approach, we will soon launch the first phase of OpenAI Luminaries, a new educator engagement track focused on co-design with teachers, practical classroom resources, and sharing teacher-led examples across countries.