India absent as OpenAI signs nine countries to school AI deal
OpenAI's first Education for Countries cohort lists Singapore, Jordan, Estonia and six others. The country with the world's largest student base is not on it.
The News
OpenAI on 20 May rolled out the next phase of its Education for Countries programme, naming nine national partners that will deploy ChatGPT Edu, Codex and a new Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite across schools and universities. The first cohort spans Estonia, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, Trinidad and Tobago, Kazakhstan, the UAE, Jordan and Singapore.
The announcement came packaged with a parallel reveal in Singapore, where the company committed S$300 million to set up its first Applied AI Lab outside the United States, with plans to hire more than 200 engineers locally and a partnership with Singapore's Ministry of Digital Development and Information.
Some of the early-cohort numbers are striking. Estonia has 20,000 students and 4,600 teachers on ChatGPT Edu. Jordan's national assistant Siraj, built on OpenAI's stack, now reaches more than 1 million students and 100,000 teachers. Kazakhstan has put 84,000 educators through AI readiness training, and university faculty in Slovakia report a saving of roughly five hours a week on lesson prep and feedback.
Why It Matters
Country-level deals are the new battleground for foundation-model vendors. Anthropic is winning US and UK federal work, Google DeepMind is pushing Gemini into European public services, and Microsoft is bundling Copilot into ministries via Azure. Education is the softer entry point: it gets a vendor in front of teachers, parents and a future workforce without the political heat of plugging an American model into a defence or judicial workflow.
The last time a single vendor moved this fast on schools, Google's G Suite for Education quietly captured roughly half of the US K-12 device market between 2014 and 2018. The Chromebook habit shaped a decade of classroom IT. OpenAI is trying the same playbook one layer up the stack, where the per-seat asset is a chatbot and the lock-in lives in teacher workflows and assessment rubrics rather than hardware.
The Singapore lab is the more interesting structural move. Putting 200-plus engineers and a research lab in Asia gives OpenAI a non-US base for deployments sensitive to US export rules or local data-residency demands, a structure that will matter more as Asian governments push on sovereignty.
Indian Angle
India is the country with the largest school-going population on the planet, north of 250 million children across roughly 1.5 million schools, and it is absent from the first nine-country cohort. That is the headline for any Indian policymaker reading this announcement.
National Education Policy 2020 explicitly identifies AI as a curriculum priority, and MeitY has run pilots with foundation-model vendors on Indic-language work. But there is no public sign yet of a flagship OpenAI compact with the Ministry of Education or with NCERT, despite the company's heavy engineering and consumer presence in India. Jordan's Siraj deployment, at one million students, is now a more visible case study than anything currently live in any Indian state, even though Jordan's entire population is smaller than Delhi's.
For Indian edtech, the read is harsher. Domestic players such as Physics Wallah and Vedantu have leaned on Indian-built tutor models partly because partnerships at this depth were not on offer. If OpenAI starts signing state governments directly, the build-versus-buy maths flips for any vendor whose moat was a CBSE-aligned content library, and listed or pre-IPO edtechs selling into government school networks now face a credible foreign competitor.
FAQ
Which nine countries are in the first cohort?
Estonia, Greece, Italy, Slovakia, Trinidad and Tobago, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Singapore. They will deploy ChatGPT Edu, Codex and the Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite, with Singapore additionally hosting OpenAI's first Applied AI Lab outside the US.
Is India part of any OpenAI national education compact?
Not at the national level. OpenAI has commercial and consumer reach in India, and individual Indian institutions can buy ChatGPT Edu directly, but India is not part of the formal Education for Countries country compact, unlike the Gulf and Central Asian peers named on 20 May.
How large is the Singapore commitment?
OpenAI announced a S$300 million commitment for its Singapore presence, including the first Applied AI Lab outside the United States and more than 200 local technical roles, struck in partnership with Singapore's Ministry of Digital Development and Information.
Where can I read the original announcement?
OpenAI's full statement is at openai.com/index/the-next-phase-of-education-for-countries.
This story was reported by OpenAI. Read the full original coverage at OpenAI.