Napster has gone from letting people copy music files from each other in 1999 to creating digital copies of teachers in 2026.
The company announced this week a new partnership with GEMS Education, a large private K-12 education provider based in Dubai, to develop and test AI agents in schools.
The first phase of the partnership will take place at the GEMS School of Research & Innovation, where teachers and students will help test the technology.
“Working in close collaboration, the two organizations will begin by developing proof-of-concept projects and showcases, including digitalization of instructors, gamified learning, AI-assisted content creation, and classroom simulations,” the companies said in a press release.
The partnership comes as Napster has fully transformed itself into an AI company.
The original Napster launched in 1999 as a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that made it easy for users to download music directly for free. After a wave of copyright lawsuits, the original service shut down in 2001.
The company has gone through several iterations since then, including as a music-streaming service. But Infinite Reality bought Napster for $207 million in 2025 and began transforming it into an AI company. Napster shut down its music-streaming service this January and has now fully pivoted to AI.
Its recent projects include AI agents that can answer customer-service calls directly over phone lines and an AI concierge for ticket sales at the Belgian Formula 1 Grand Prix.
Now Napster is bringing that technology into the classroom.
As part of the GEMS partnership, the company plans to create “digital twins” of teachers built around their own subject-matter knowledge. According to Wired, the AI personas will be trained on teachers’ materials, courses, and papers, allowing students to talk to them outside class and get extra help at their own pace.
Naturally, the development of digital versions of teachers that can work around the clock raises concerns about whether the technology could cost educators their jobs or lead to subpar educational standards in the name of saving a buck. Napster and GEMS are already trying to assuage those fears. The press release says the initiative is designed to “extend the reach and impact” of teachers, not replace them.
“The lesson is the smallest part of what a teacher does, and she has thirty kids and four minutes after the bell for the ones who didn’t get it,” Napster’s Chief Product Officer Ziv Navoth told Gizmodo in an emailed statement. “We’re extending her: a tutor built on her material that a student can talk to at nine at night, in the language they think in. Replacing teachers is a race to the bottom, and that’s not on our roadmap.”
The companies say they are aiming to have a working solution ready before the end of 2026, with the goal of deploying the technology across GEMS schools in the Middle East and beyond.