On September 2, 2026, New York City told nearly 600,000 children that they would not be using generative AI at school this year. The moratorium runs from 2-K to the end of eighth grade, covering two thirds of the system's students. Companion chatbots are prohibited across all grades. Teachers keep their access.
Since then, the question school leaders have put to me most often is not whether New York was right. It is where the line should fall in their own school.
That question is harder than it looks, because your school is already operating under an age line, and in most cases nobody there chose it. Three different lines run through the same building, drawn by three different authorities for three different reasons. The most common mistake I see is a policy that draws one of them and assumes it settles the other two.
At what age should students be allowed to use AI?
There is no single right age, and any answer that offers you one number is answering a different question from the one you asked.
The defensible position is to hold three lines rather than one: the age the supplier's own terms allow, the age at which the learning a task builds is no longer under construction, and the age at which an adult in your school could actually tell what a child did. Where the three disagree, the most restrictive one governs until somebody writes down why it should not. That is a decision a leadership team can explain to a parent, a governor or an inspector. A single number is not.
The Three Age Lines
The Three Age Lines are the three different age limits every school is already operating under, whether it has noticed them or not: the contractual line, which the supplier's terms set and the school agreed to without choosing; the developmental line, below which the learning a task builds is still under construction, so handing the task to a machine takes the learning with it; and the supervisory line, the age at which an adult in the school could actually tell what a child did with the tool. A policy that draws one line and assumes it covers the other two is not an age policy. It is one line doing three jobs badly.
I offer this as a way of thinking rather than a tested instrument. Its only claim is that the three lines exist whether or not you draw them, and that they rarely fall in the same place.
| The line | Who drew it | What moves it | The question to ask |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contractual | The supplier, in terms you accepted | Choosing a product built for that age, or putting an adult at the keyboard | What age do the terms say, and has anyone here read them this year? |
| Developmental | The task, not the birthday | Changing the task so the machine is not doing the part that teaches | What is this task building, and is it still under construction? |
| Supervisory | Your school's own capacity to see | Changing when and where the work happens | Could an adult here tell what this child actually did, and how soon? |
The contractual line: the age you have already agreed to
The contractual line is the minimum age written into the supplier's terms, and in most schools it is quietly being crossed by tools that staff recommend in good faith.
OpenAI's position is unambiguous. Its help documentation states that "ChatGPT is not meant for children under 13, and we require that children ages 13 to 18 obtain parental consent before using ChatGPT." It goes further for schools: where ChatGPT is used in education with children under 13, "the actual interaction with ChatGPT must be conducted by an adult." Google draws its line in the same place. When it opened the Gemini app to students through Workspace for Education, the announcement of November 8, 2024 scoped it to "teen users (ages 13+ or the applicable age in your country)."
Read those two together and something awkward follows. An elementary or primary school debating whether to let nine-year-olds use a general-purpose assistant is debating a question its suppliers have already answered. The choice actually available is narrower: an adult works the tool while children watch and direct, or the school buys a product built for that age group, or it does neither and accepts that it is operating outside the terms it agreed to.
None of this makes thirteen a safety threshold. It is a legal and commercial boundary, not a developmental finding, and treating it as evidence about children is the second mistake in this area. What it does tell you is who has agreed to what, which is precisely the question a parent will ask first.
It is also a line children cross without us. The Common Sense Media Census, published June 8, 2026 from a survey of 1,204 children aged 9 to 17, found that 86% use AI and nearly a quarter use it daily, while more than 40% said no parent or guardian had ever discussed AI safety with them. A school that sets its line at thirteen and stops there has settled its paperwork and left most of its nine to twelve year olds using these tools with no adult in the conversation at all.
The developmental line: what is still being built
The developmental line is not really about age. It is about whether the thing a task builds is finished.
This is where the Handover Question does its work. The Handover Question is the one test I ask school leaders to put to every task children are set: if a machine did this for them, what would they lose? If the answer is nothing, hand it over and use the time better. If the answer is the learning itself, protect it, and be able to say why.
Notice what that test does not contain: a birthday. A sixteen-year-old structuring an extended argument for the first time is at the same point in that skill as a nine-year-old composing a paragraph for the first time. The developmental line moves by subject, by task and by pupil, which is exactly why it cannot be set once at the front of a policy and left there.
England's Department for Education has built the same idea into what it expects of products rather than of children. Its generative AI product safety standards, published January 19, 2026, ask developers to "detect cognitive offloading actions that indicate the learner is asking the system to do the work for them," and to avoid handing over "final answers, full solutions, or complete worked examples by default." Those standards are written for suppliers, not schools, and the department says only that schools may find them helpful. But they are a useful signal of where the argument has moved: the serious question is no longer whether a child is old enough, it is whether the product is doing the part of the work that was supposed to teach them something.
The supervisory line: whether an adult could tell
The supervisory line is the age at which your school can actually see what a child did with AI, and it is almost always the line nobody has drawn.
This one is not about the child. It is about you. A task set in a supervised lesson, on a school device, with the process visible, sits above the supervisory line at almost any age. The same task set as homework, on a family tablet, sits below it at every age, because nobody in the school can tell what happened. Schools routinely write policies that permit at fourteen what they cannot observe at any age, and then treat the resulting confusion as a student integrity problem.
The regulation now being written assumes somebody is doing the seeing. The same DfE standards note that services must use "highly effective age assurance" to keep children in the UK from encountering the most harmful content, under the Online Safety Act. Age assurance at the product end only works if someone at the school end knows which children are using which tools and can check. That is a job with a name attached, which is the same argument I make about what a school should require before approving an AI tool at all.
What New York decided, and what it did not
New York drew a grade line, which is the easiest kind of line to enforce and the hardest kind to defend on its own.
The detail is more interesting than the headline. The moratorium covers student-facing generative AI from 2-K through eighth grade for one year. Companion chatbots go across all grades. Up to 50,000 high school students continue inside five named pilots, and all high schoolers get twice-yearly AI literacy classes. Teachers keep AI for planning and operational work. A Technology in Schools Coalition will assess the moratorium and report with recommendations.
The exemptions are the part worth studying. Assistive technology for students with disabilities is exempt. So are multilingual learners, and students in career readiness programs such as computer science. Every one of those is a developmental judgment wearing the clothes of a grade rule. A student using assistive technology to reach the curriculum is not offloading the learning, they are getting to it. Which tells you that a grade line alone was not sufficient even for the system that drew it, and that the exemptions are where the real policy lives.
If your leadership team is weighing a restriction of its own rather than a line inside one, the prior question is how to make a restriction decision you can defend, and it should be settled before the age question, not after.
What I Have Learned From Working With Schools
The age line is almost never written down, and leaders usually discover their own only when a parent asks them what it is.
Speaking at education conferences internationally, the question I am asked most often once the session ends is no longer which tool a school should choose. It is at what age. The same question arrives in the same words from systems with completely different regulations, which is itself a finding: nobody has been given a defensible answer, so everybody is improvising one.
Across the schools I work with, three patterns repeat. The line is inherited rather than set, usually from whichever platform the school already licenses. The contractual line is discovered late, often in the middle of a complaint, which is the worst possible moment to read the terms for the first time. And the supervisory line is never discussed at all, because it is the only one of the three that is about the adults.
Three things I say in every session on this. First, attach the age in your policy to a task rather than to a birthday, or you will spend the year defending an arbitrary number. Second, if you cannot say who set your current line, you have not set it, you have accepted someone else's. Third, a line you cannot supervise is not a line, it is an intention, and students work out the difference faster than staff do.
When the three lines disagree
When the three lines disagree, the most restrictive one governs, and moving it requires changing something real rather than rewriting the policy.
There are only three honest ways to move a line. Change the product, to one built and licensed for that age. Change the task, so the machine is not doing the part that teaches. Change the supervision, so the work happens where an adult can see it. Anything else is not a decision, it is a permission slip written to the school by itself.
Two limits on this, stated plainly. It gives you no single number to publish, which some governing boards will find unsatisfying, and the honest reply is that a number they cannot defend is worse than a rule they can. And it asks more of staff than a grade cut-off does, because task-level judgments have to be made by the person setting the task. That is a real workload question, and the way through it is a short list of task types agreed once for a department rather than a judgment made afresh every lesson.
What to do this term
Start by finding out which line you are actually operating under, because almost every school has one and almost none has chosen it.
Take the three or four AI-capable tools your students touch most and read the minimum age in each supplier's terms. Write the ages in a single column next to the year groups that use them, and see where the column contradicts itself. That exercise usually takes an hour and settles arguments that have been running for a term.
Then take two tasks per subject, not twenty, and put the Handover Question to them. Mark each one hand over, protect, or redesign. Do the same for one homework task, because homework is where the supervisory line fails first.
Last, write one sentence for parents saying what your school allows at what age and why, and check that a parent could act on it at the kitchen table without calling the school. If they could not, the policy is about you rather than about them, which is the point I make about talking to parents about AI. And keep teaching about AI at every age while you restrict its use at some of them, because a child who has never used it and never understood it is the worst of both decisions. That is the distinction underneath what AI literacy actually means in a school.
If your leadership team is setting this line for the year ahead, this is the kind of decision I help schools and trusts settle through AI strategy sessions for schools: not which number to publish, but which three lines you are holding and who owns each one.
Sources and further reading
- Office of the Mayor, City of New York, "Mayor Mamdani and Chancellor Samuels Put Students First with Nation's Broadest Generative AI Moratorium in Schools," September 2, 2026. nyc.gov
- OpenAI, "Is ChatGPT safe for all ages?," OpenAI Help Center. help.openai.com
- Google Workspace Updates, "Expanding access to the Gemini app for teen students in education," November 8, 2024. workspaceupdates.googleblog.com
- Department for Education, "Generative AI: product safety standards," GOV.UK, January 19, 2026. gov.uk
- Common Sense Media, "Common Sense Media Releases Inaugural Annual Study on AI Use by Tweens and Teens," June 8, 2026. commonsensemedia.org
Dan Fitzpatrick is the founder of The AI Educator and speaks internationally on what AI means for schools and the people who lead them. More about Dan.
