Dear members of the MIT community,
It’s rare that a successful institution has to take a fresh look at many aspects of its mission. But I’m convinced that the opportunities and risks generative AI poses for our model of education and research now constitute such a watershed for MIT – and for all of higher education.
Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
Below my signature, you’ll find a letter from Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, and Chair of the Faculty Roger Levy. In January, they charged the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training. Today, they share the committee’s final report.
I urge you to read it – and I hope you’ll be inspired by its clear-eyed view of the scope of the work before us, and by its energetic commitment to the deep human values of MIT.
As the report makes clear, MIT was founded to help human beings develop their own powers of discovery, problem solving, and invention. That is still and will always be our essential work.
Against that backdrop, AI presents itself to us as a kind of superpower, with both extraordinary potential and disturbing risks. Our challenge now is to derive its benefits and counteract its harms, as we strive “to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.”
In the committee’s words, “This is not an optional exercise.”
Practical changes, practical support
In the realm of education, this will require a lot of practical changes, from reevaluating how we assess what students have learned, to reemphasizing hands-on learning, to ensuring that every class has an AI use policy suited to its purpose. At the Institute level, we’re aggressively developing guidance, instruction, models, pilot funding, and “communities of practice” to help meet the moment.
Building a shared culture
But far and away the most important work will be cultural. As a community, we need to arrive at a shared understanding of the proper role of AI in education at MIT and in our life together on campus, along with shared norms and values around what we can properly do with these new tools, and what we should expect from and owe to one another.
MIT has deep ties to the birth and development of AI and – through our researchers and our graduates – to its future evolution. We therefore have a duty to prepare our students to know when and how to use AI effectively, wisely, ethically, and responsibly, and when not to use it at all. And we need to equip them to apply these formative personal lessons in whatever work they choose to do in the world.
To our students: Today’s report may bring some sense of relief, if only because it calls on instructors and departments to provide clear, explicit policies about when and how you must, may, or must not use AI in a given subject or field.
But I hope you will read the report as something much larger: as a tribute to your human value and potential; a promise to ensure your education helps you flourish, learn, and grow; and an invitation to work with us, and frankly to teach us too, as we navigate this new educational terrain.
AI in the research enterprise
Simultaneously, in virtually every area of experimental research, new AI tools are dramatically expanding the scope and increasing the pace of discovery. MIT researchers are already using these tools to rapidly accelerate their ability to generate promising hypotheses and pressure-test possible solutions. There’s no telling how fast and how far these tools will allow us to expand the frontiers of knowledge – and therefore of innovation.
While our community absorbs and responds to the insights of today’s report on AI in education, institutionally we are working to develop discipline-specific communities of practice and other central support to help faculty make the most of AI in their own research and advance its responsible use in their respective fields. More to come on this as the semester unfolds. A lot to do – together
In the words of today’s report, “There is a lot to do.”
MIT is and must always be a place that activates the human mind and spirit and that unites creative people in fulfilling the Institute’s great mission. As we define the Institute’s next chapter, AI will test our commitment to that educational ideal. For the sake of our students, for the future of MIT and for the shape of our sector and our society, it’s imperative that we get this right.
Sincerely, Sally Kornbluth
President
Dear members of the MIT community,
We write to share the final report** **of the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training. The report responds to the weight of this moment with clarity, humanity, and a strong call to action.
We charged the committee in January 2026 with three tasks: to assess current AI use by instructors and students; identify innovations in teaching and teaching assessment; and propose an AI use policy. The committee fulfilled this charge.
To our community’s great benefit, it also did much more: It challenged us, as a community, to take on “a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.”
The report outlines principles to guide our actions. It then recommends that MIT take immediate and longer-term actions in three broad areas, calling on us to:
- Create “AI-aware" educational processes that ready students for the world: revisit what students need to learn and how to achieve learning goals, both inside and outside the classroom. This will require resources, experimentation, and changes to assessments, policies, and more.
- Center people, community, and the residential experience to strengthen our social fabric and sustain MIT’s deep intellectual community.
- Build processes, teams, and tools for continuous reflection, iteration, and improvement, so that our solutions can evolve and adapt given the startling rate of change in AI.
All of us – faculty, students, and staff alike – have a role to play. Later today, instructors will receive a message that points to guidance they may find useful in formulating AI policies for the classes they are teaching this fall. In the weeks ahead, we will share additional information about new structures and resources to help implement the committee’s recommendations. And your feedback on the report is welcome; you can share it by writing to ai-teachingandlearning@mit.edu.
We wish to express our deep gratitude to the committee’s co-chairs, Professors Eric Klopfer and Samuel Madden, and to all the committee members. The committee consulted extensively with our community members and experts and has produced an inspiring framework for the work that we must boldly undertake together to prepare our students, starting now, for a rapidly changing world. We thank them for their excellent work.
Sincerely, Melissa Nobles
Chancellor
Anantha Chandrakasan
Provost
Roger Levy
Chair of the Faculty