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Estonia offers free ChatGPT accounts to school children

Jun 3, 2026, 8:43am EDT
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A classroom in Tallinn.
Ints Kalnins/Reuters

Estonia will provide schoolchildren with free ChatGPT accounts.

Tallinn noted that most high-school students were using AI for schoolwork, The Wall Street Journal reported, but has decided to embrace it rather than clamp down. Teachers use chatbots in role-playing scenarios, such as reimagining the dinner party where Mary Shelley created Frankenstein, or getting students to improve AI-written essays.

There is an echo of Sweden’s move to provide cheap computers around the millennium, to which entrepreneurs credit the country’s rich startup culture, as well as Estonia’s own 1996 “Tiger Leap” policy of providing computers in school.

Whether coincidentally or not, the tiny Baltic nation of just 1.3 million people would go on to produce Bolt, Skype, and Wise.

— Tom Chivers
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