Google’s Mask Is Beginning to Slip

Google has a message for America’s schools: Use our AI tools, or else. 

Amid growing concern about the impact AI is having on children’s learning and cognition, more and more school districts are choosing to opt out. 

But Google will not let them. 

In a shocking power play, Google announced that starting in early 2027, the company will disable its AI tools by default for K-12 student accounts, giving schools the choice to enable them. 

But there is a catch. 

Schools that want to block AI entirely will also lose access to Google search.

Google justifies this move by saying that AI is so deeply integrated into its search engine that the two can no longer be separated: You cannot have one without the other. 

This move by Google comes just one day after the company was instructed to respond to a letter from Senators Hawley (R-MO) and Blumenthal (D-CT) expressing “grave concerns” about Google’s aggressive push of AI products to children in schools and follows on the heels of a Wall Street Journal investigation in September which found that Google’s ubiquitous AI tools in American classrooms had led to many students becoming emotionally and academically dependent on AI. 

The letter cites Google’s hegemonic grip on America’s classrooms: More than 150 million students around the world use Google Classroom, and 93 percent of U.S. school districts planned to purchase Google Chromebooks in 2025.

Shutting off access to Google search would not have been a catastrophic loss for students and teachers 20 years ago, when schools still had substantial physical libraries and students were taught how to use card catalogs, encyclopedias, and other analog research tools. 

But for nearly three decades, students have become increasingly reliant on Google search for research. For a generation of students — maybe more — effectively means “Googling” something. 

As early as 2012, a Pew Research Center survey found that 94 percent of middle and high school teachers said their students were very likely to use Google or another search engine for a typical research assignment. Only 12 percent said the same about printed books other than textbooks, and just 16 percent about consulting a research librarian.

Schools have spent decades building educational practices around digital tools while allowing some of the infrastructure and expertise that supported traditional research to disappear. 

A 2021 study found that within a decade (2008 to 2018), the number of school librarians declined by about 20 percent even as student populations grew, while at the same time, the American Library Association’s 2026 budget survey found more school librarians reporting flat or declining materials budgets (61 percent, up from 47 percent in 2023). More schools are cutting back on or entirely eliminating designated library space (the proportion of secondary schools with a designated library space fell from 96 percent in 2014 to 86 percent in 2019), and in 2023, 15 percent of schools reported no financial support for library services. 

Now Google is telling schools that if they want to retain access to its search engine, they must accept some of its AI functionality.

This move is all the more galling in light of a growing body of evidence that AI is hurting students’ ability to think. 

The WSJ quotes one 15-year-old student who used AI for homework assistance but then was unable to perform on tests. “It slowed my thinking down,” the student said. “When I was in a test and I couldn’t use AI, it was hard to think.” 

His experience is not unique. A 2025 MIT study found that over four months, Large Language Model (LLM) users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Even Google’s own researchers warned that AI tools can pose elevated risks to children and have the potential for cognitive and emotional harm. “We’re doing this experiment on an entire generation on cognitive development, with no control group,” former Google research scientist Mikel Rodriguez told the WSJ.

The irony is hard to miss. When Google was founded over two decades ago, the motto “Don’t be evil” appeared under the now familiar multi-color logo.

The phrase used to be the governing philosophy of a once-trusted brand, one that set it apart from and above competitors who, in the view of Google’s founders, exploited consumers for profit. The phrase appeared in Google’s Corporate Code of Conduct and in the prospectus for its 2004 initial public offering. 

Either this was never anything more than a marketing gimmick, or Google’s corporate culture has fundamentally changed in the ensuing decades, because now we have one of the most powerful technology companies in the world giving schools a kind of all-or-nothing Hobson’s choice, coercing schools into adopting tools that are unproven at best, and demonstrably harmful at worst. 

The real lesson here is that schools have made themselves far too dependent on a single company’s ecosystem, and that dependence hands Google extraordinary leverage to dictate the terms on which its tools enter the classroom. Today it is AI. Tomorrow it could be anything else. The sooner schools start moving away from Google-dominated EdTech and rebuilding the libraries, librarians, and research skills they allowed to erode, the sooner they can make decisions about their students’ learning on their own terms, not Google’s.

Melissa Henson is the Senior Policy Advisor for Media and Culture for Concerned Women for America, the nation’s public policy women’s organization, dedicated to promoting biblical values and constitutional principles in public policy. On X: @CWforA

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