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A Brief · May 2026

The Case for the Three

Three companies,
every classroom.

By the spring of 2026, three American laboratories — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — have effectively divided the world of generative artificial intelligence among themselves. Their flagship models, released within weeks of one another this year, now sit on the desktops of investment bankers, the phones of medical residents, and, increasingly, the laptops of undergraduates. Where they go, the question of what a university teaches and how it teaches it goes with them. This is a brief, prepared for the president of Babson College, on what these companies offer to higher education, which peer institutions have already taken them up on it, and what it costs.

Prepared for the Office of the President · For internal reference, not for distribution.

I — The Three

The three labs that train the AI in students' hands.

To understand the offer being made to universities in 2026, it helps to start with the products themselves. The three companies in question publish in quick succession — and lately on the same week — flagship models that set the ceiling for what the rest of the industry can do. Each has a personality. Each has a sales motion built around higher education. And each has spent the last eighteen months in the same set of provosts' offices.

i.

OpenAI

San Francisco · ChatGPT · the consumer brand

OpenAI's flagship, GPT-5.5, was released on April 23, 2026.1 It is, by the company's own framing, a step-change in agentic reasoning — the kind of model meant to do things rather than merely describe them. The following day OpenAI introduced Workspace Agents, a feature that lets ChatGPT operate inside Salesforce, Slack, and HubSpot on a user's behalf, executing multi-step workflows that a year ago required a human in the loop.2

For universities, OpenAI offers ChatGPT Edu and ChatGPT Enterprise — institutional licenses, administrative controls, retention policies, and an SSO-friendly deployment story.3 The retail price for a comparable business seat is roughly twenty dollars per user per month; institutional contracts are negotiated downward from there.

OpenAI is, by some distance, the most recognizable brand in this market. It is also the one that pursued higher education first and most aggressively — a strategy now legible in a roster of deployments that includes Wharton, Oxford, UCLA, and the entire Cal State system.

ii.

Anthropic

San Francisco · Claude · the careful one

Anthropic's flagship, Claude Opus 4.7, was released on April 16, 2026.4 Opus is the model the company has positioned for long, careful reasoning — the kind of work that benefits from a million-token context window and a temperament that, in its own marketing, prizes nuance over speed. Among technical users it is the model most often paired with serious writing.

Anthropic's higher-education product, Claude for Education, launched in April 2025 and includes a feature called Learning Mode — a tutoring posture that, rather than answering a question outright, walks a student through it.5 The company does not publish a list price for institutional contracts; pricing is negotiated, and several of its university deals have included multi-year free or discounted access in exchange for partnership and feedback.6

Anthropic is the smallest of the three. It is also the one most often described, by university officers who have signed with it, as the most pedagogically attentive. The pattern of its deployments — Northeastern, LSE, Champlain — reflects that.

iii.

Google

Mountain View · Gemini · the incumbent in the building

Google's flagship, Gemini 3.1 Pro, was released on February 19, 2026.7 Like its predecessor, it ships with a context window of roughly one million tokens — long enough to swallow a casebook, a syllabus, and the meeting notes that produced them. In April the company introduced Workspace Intelligence, which layers agentic features over Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet, the tools already running on most campuses.8

Google's higher-education program runs through Google for Education and the AI Pro for Education seat, which lists at fifteen dollars per user per month through authorized resellers.9 Because Workspace for Education is already deployed at most U.S. universities — Babson among them — the marginal step to Gemini is, in operational terms, smaller than for the other two.

Google is the company that universities most often already pay. That is both its principal advantage and the reason it tends to win when an institution wants the lowest-friction path to a campus-wide deployment.

II — At the Peers

What other universities have already done.

A useful question to ask, before any institutional decision, is whether anyone like us has already made it. In this case the answer is unambiguous. Each of the three companies has, within the last two years, signed agreements with a recognizable slice of the institutions Babson considers peers — and, in some cases, with whole state systems.

OpenAI's universities.

The Wharton School announced a strategic investment in AI for teaching and research in May 2024 and has since rolled ChatGPT access out to its full MBA cohort.11 In September 2025, the University of Oxford became the first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to every staff member and student — roughly fifty thousand accounts under a single contract.12 A year earlier, UCLA had done the same in California, becoming the first university in the state to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise campus-wide.13 And in February 2025 the California State University system — twenty-three campuses, four hundred and sixty thousand students, sixty-three thousand faculty and staff — signed what OpenAI described as the largest deployment of ChatGPT in education anywhere in the world.14

Anthropic's universities.

Northeastern University announced a campus-wide partnership with Anthropic in April 2025, extending Claude to all of its thirteen global campuses.16 The London School of Economics joined as a launch partner the following month, with a year of access to an extended-context version of Claude offered to every student and staff member at no cost.17 And Champlain College — a small private institution in Vermont, in the vicinity of Babson's own profile — signed a two-year free-access agreement with Anthropic in March 2025, framed as a collaboration on AI literacy and curriculum.18

Google's universities.

Rice University adopted Google's Gemini and NotebookLM tools campus-wide in September 2025, citing the existing Workspace footprint as decisive.19 In March 2026, the University of Houston system — comprising four universities and roughly seventy thousand students — launched Google Gemini for Education, with data-sovereignty terms negotiated specifically for academic use.20 Google has confirmed that more than a thousand U.S. institutions, reaching more than ten million students, are now running its Education AI features — including Brown, MIT, Ohio State, and Michigan.10

The pattern is straightforward. Each company has at least one peer-tier institution, at least one Ivy-or-Oxbridge name, and at least one system-scale customer. The first-mover question, for an institution like Babson, is no longer whether the peer set has deployed — it has — but with which of the three.

III — The Cost

What it costs.

The conversation about AI in higher education is sometimes treated as a frontier-budget question — a matter of capital projects and capital campaigns. The contracts that have been signed suggest something more modest.

$17M

The all-in figure California State University agreed to pay OpenAI, over eighteen months, to provide ChatGPT access to roughly five hundred thousand users.15

Divide it out and the math is unintimidating. CSU's contract works out to a little over twenty dollars per user per year — well below OpenAI's twenty-dollar-per-user-per-month retail business rate. That gap is what an institutional contract looks like at scale: the per-seat price collapses, the procurement risk transfers to the vendor, and the system, rather than the student, becomes the customer.

For an institution of Babson's size — roughly three thousand five hundred undergraduates and graduate students, plus faculty and staff — the order of magnitude is meaningfully smaller. At list price, a campus-wide deployment of any one of the three providers falls in the range of roughly nine hundred thousand to one-point-two million dollars per year. Negotiated institutional rates, and the multi-year discount or free-access pilots offered to early partners, can put that number considerably lower. Several of Anthropic's campus partners are paying nothing for the first year.

What that price buys, at any of the three, is: a campus-wide license; an administrative console for IT; data-handling and retention terms that, in most current contracts, exclude customer prompts from model training; and a vendor relationship with the company whose product the students are already using on their personal accounts.

IV — Coda

What kind of institution.

The decision in front of universities this year is not, in any honest reading, a frontier decision. The three companies are real, the products are mature, the peer set has deployed, and the cost is in the range of a faculty line. The decision is, more straightforwardly, about which version of an entrepreneurship education an institution wants its students to inherit — one in which the most consequential business tools of the decade arrive on their own laptops at home, or one in which they arrive, with instruction, in the classroom.

The companies will not wait. The peers have not waited. The students, in the meantime, are already using all three.

Sources

References.

Citations follow APA 7th-edition format. URLs verified May 2026.

  1. OpenAI. (2026, April 23). Introducing GPT-5.5. openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-5
  2. OpenAI. (2026, April 22). Introducing Workspace Agents in ChatGPT. openai.com/index/introducing-workspace-agents-in-chatgpt
  3. OpenAI. (n.d.). ChatGPT for education. openai.com/chatgpt/education
  4. Anthropic. (2026, April 16). Introducing Claude Opus 4.7. anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7
  5. Anthropic. (2025, April 2). Introducing Claude for Education. anthropic.com/news/introducing-claude-for-education
  6. Anthropic. (n.d.). Claude for education. claude.com/solutions/education
  7. Google. (2026, February 19). Gemini 3.1 Pro: A smarter model for your most complex tasks. The Keyword. blog.google/…/gemini-3-1-pro
  8. Google Workspace. (2026, April 22). New Workspace Intelligence delivers unified, real-time understanding to power agentic work. workspace.google.com/…/introducing-workspace-intelligence
  9. Google. (n.d.). Google for Education. edu.google.com
  10. Google. (2025). Gemini for Education: How higher education is using Google AI. The Keyword. blog.google/…/gemini-higher-education-benefits
  11. The Wharton School. (2024, May 29). The Wharton School makes strategic investment in artificial intelligence research and teaching. University of Pennsylvania. news.wharton.upenn.edu/…
  12. University of Oxford. (2025, September 19). Oxford becomes first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all staff and students. ox.ac.uk/news/…
  13. UCLA. (2024, September 20). UCLA is set to introduce ChatGPT Enterprise on campus. newsroom.ucla.edu/…
  14. California State University. (2025, February 4). CSU announces landmark initiative to become nation's first and largest AI-empowered university system. calstate.edu/…
  15. Mardirosian, A. (2026, May 1). Inside Cal State's big $17 million bet on ChatGPT for all. LAist. laist.com/…
  16. Northeastern University. (2025, April 2). Northeastern and Anthropic to lead in responsible AI innovation in higher education. news.northeastern.edu/…
  17. London School of Economics. (2025, May). Anthropic's Claude for Education. info.lse.ac.uk/…
  18. Champlain College. (2025, March 25). Champlain College collaborates with Anthropic to advance AI in higher ed. champlain.edu/…
  19. Rice University. (2025, September 16). Rice adopts Google's generative AI solution to enhance student learning and faculty support. news.rice.edu/…
  20. University of Houston. (2026, March 17). University of Houston launches Google Gemini for Education to advance AI research and student success. uh.edu/…