New York City is telling its youngest students to put the chatbots down.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium today barring AI tools from classrooms for students from Pre-K through eighth grade, starting with the 2026-2027 school year. The policy, set by the city's Department of Education, covers roughly 600,000 public school students. It also bars teachers from using AI to grade assignments, adds new limits on digital devices, and pairs the ban with a small pilot program testing AI education tools. High schoolers are exempt from the restrictions.
This is a broader swing than most district-level AI policies, which tend to focus on plagiarism detection or usage guidelines rather than outright bans. By blocking AI grading too, the city is drawing a line around teacher judgment as much as student learning. The one-year window suggests this is meant as a pause for evaluation, not a permanent stance.
Whether a pilot program can coexist with a blanket ban for younger grades is the kind of tension NYC schools will have to work out in real time.