Claude for Education: How Anthropic is Shaping AI’s Role in Learning with Drew Bent

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Aug 21, 2025

Drew Bent, who leads Education at Anthropic and co-founded Schoolhouse.world, shares his insights on the intersection of AI and education. He discusses why Claude is focusing on educational uses and highlights findings from the Education Report on AI's impact on student learning. Drew explains how Claude's innovative ‘learning mode’ promotes Socratic dialogue and encourages critical thinking, countering the tendency toward passive learning. He also envisions a future where AI enhances human interactions in education rather than replacing them.

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INSIGHT

Education Emerged From Real Usage Data

Anthropic prioritized education because large-scale usage showed learning and teaching were top use cases after coding.
The lab sees responsibility to study and shape real-world educational impacts of Claude.

INSIGHT

Privacy-Preserving Large-Scale Research

Anthropic analyzed 500,000 conversations using a privacy-preserving pipeline with Claude summarizing interactions before human review.
This allowed empirical, shareable insights into large-scale student behaviour without inspecting individual chats.

INSIGHT

Claude Performs High-Level Tasks Too Often

When mapping Claude's behavior to Bloom's Taxonomy, Anthropic found an inverted pyramid: the model did higher-order tasks more than basic recall.
That raises cognitive offloading risks and highlights the need to teach students to evaluate AI outputs.

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Drew Bent leads Education as part of Anthropic's Beneficial Deployments. He also co-founded the tutoring non-profit Schoolhouse.world with Sal Khan. Prior to that, he wrote code at Khan Academy, taught high school math, and has been tutoring students for over a decade. Drew has degrees in physics & CS from MIT, and an education master's from Stanford.

💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Why Anthropic made education one of Claude’s first real-world focus areas
Insights from Anthropic’s Education Report on how students actually use AI
How Claude’s “learning mode” fosters Socratic dialogue and reduces “brain rot”
The tension between LLMs as answer machines vs. pedagogically sound tutors
What the future of AI tutoring, peer learning, and collaborative tools could look like

✨ Episode Highlights:

[00:01:13] Drew Bent’s journey from teaching and tutoring to leading education at Anthropic
[00:02:50] Why education emerged as a top use case for Claude
[00:04:20] Findings from Anthropic’s Education Report: how students really use AI
[00:06:59] Claude and Bloom’s Taxonomy—strengths, gaps, and risks of cognitive offloading
[00:09:22] Building learning modes: shifting from answer machines to Socratic dialogue
[00:12:53] How Drew’s tutoring background informs AI product design
[00:17:26] The role of AI in fostering—not replacing—human-to-human learning
[00:21:00] Students’ call for “learning mode” to avoid brain rot
[00:26:41] Sneak peek: Anthropic’s upcoming learning mode for Claude Code

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