Can a school let AI companies train on student work?

In most states, today, the answer is governed by the contract rather than by statute — and the default terms of many consumer and ed-tech products permit it. That is changing: several states moved during 2026 to prohibit using student data to train AI models, but the picture is uneven and much of it is still pending. Until it settles, the protection a family or a school actually has is the one they negotiated or chose.

What is moving

California AB 1159 would prohibit using student data to train AI, covering any online service used by a school. It has passed its first chamber.

Idaho SB 1227 is enacted and includes data-privacy requirements for AI tools, plus a procurement provision: vendors "shall disclose whether products utilize machine learning, predictive analytics, or generative AI and shall provide assurances regarding data protection, algorithmic transparency, and responsible use." Districts must also comply with Idaho student-data privacy law, the Idaho parental rights act, FERPA, CIPA and COPPA.

Vermont HB 650 would require ed-tech providers to register and certify privacy compliance annually. Passed its first chamber.

Illinois SB 3735 would restrict the use and retention of student data for AI training without consent. Introduced.

New York A 9190 would restrict classroom AI use below ninth grade. Introduced.

Alongside these sit the older student-privacy laws that already apply — FERPA federally, and state statutes such as California's SOPIPA, which for years have restricted targeted advertising and profiling using student data. AI training was not contemplated when most of them were drafted, which is exactly the gap the 2026 bills are trying to close.

Why "we do not sell data" is not the answer to this question

Vendors say it constantly and it is usually true and it is not responsive. Training a model on student work is not selling it. The data does not change hands; it changes the product. A company can hold to every word of a no-sale promise while a child's essays improve a commercial system indefinitely.

The question that gets a real answer is narrower: is student-submitted content used to train, fine-tune or evaluate your models, or those of any third party you send it to?

Four questions worth asking any vendor

Where does student work physically go? Into our own school or family account, or onto the vendor's servers? This single distinction settles most of the rest.

Is it used for training, by you or by a subprocessor? Ask about subprocessors specifically. Many ed-tech products are a thin layer over a third-party model, and the terms that matter may be the model provider's.

What happens when we leave? Deletion on request, deletion on termination, or retention "for legitimate business purposes" — and can you get the work out in a usable form?

Can you put that in writing? A marketing page is not a commitment. A data processing agreement is.

The structural answer

All of this gets much simpler if the work never leaves your own account. A tool that runs inside a school's or a family's own Google or Microsoft tenancy, producing ordinary documents, has no vendor-side store to argue about. There is nothing to train on because there is nothing there.

That is not a slogan, it is an architecture, and it is worth preferring where it is available — partly for privacy and partly because it survives the vendor. A product whose student work lives on someone else's servers is a product whose student work disappears when that company pivots or closes.

Where ZEROTH sits

ZEROTH installs into the buyer's own Google account and runs there. There is no publisher server in the loop, no telemetry and no account with us, so learner work never reaches us and could not be used to train anything even if we wanted it to. Our terms say we do not permit the course materials to be used as training data either, which is the same principle pointed the other way.

Within the course, learners do use third-party AI tools, and those relationships are directly between the user and the provider under the provider's own terms. We teach students to read those terms, which is the only durable protection any of us has.