Google announces partnership with Khan Academy to build AI learning tools

Google has announced a partnership with the nonprofit Khan Academy to build new AI-powered learning tools using Google’s Gemini models. The first rollout brings Gemini into Khan Academy’s Writing Coach, designed to coach students through outlining, drafting, and refining their ideas rather than producing a completed answer.

With Writing Coach, teachers can choose a full interactive experience or a feedback-only mode. Writing Coach is available for grades 7–12 and is in U.S. beta for grades 5–6, supporting persuasive, expository, and literary analysis essays. Later this year,

Khan Academy plans a Gemini-powered Reading Coach for grades 5–12, letting teachers assign interactive experiences with varied texts while Gemini asks comprehension questions and provides class- and student-level insights.

The partnership also extends to Schoolhouse.world, which will use Gemini for post-session tutor coaching and an AI session simulator to help tutors practice with virtual student profiles—aiming to strengthen human tutoring, not replace it in classrooms.

Tom’s Take: As I’ve written, the future of educational technology is revolving around a high-stakes infrastructure competition between Google, leveraging its Workspace for Education platform, now supercharged by the powerful Gemini 3 model, and OpenAI. Google was especially aggressive in the edtech sector in 2025 and its partnership with Khan Academy is a signal it will be aggressive in 2026. The partnership is somewhat surprising since GPT models from OpenAI were powering Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI tutor, and Khanmigo was featured in OpenAI’s launch of GPT-4.

AI tutors are becoming more sophisticated and better able to act as disciplined educators who deliberately prioritize students' learning processes and cognitive development. In time, AI tutoring will move from a linear, session-based interaction to an adaptive, predictive, and continuous coaching relationship.