Caribbean & Central America - January 2026

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele announced a partnership with artificial intelligence firm xAI to use AI tools in public schools throughout the country in a statement published 11 December.

xAI, which is owned by US tech mogul Elon Musk, said that it will bring its Grok chatbot to over 5,000 public schools in El Salvador over the next two years, in what it calls the world’s first nationwide AI-powered education programme. The partnership will work on “delivering personalized learning to over one million students and empowering thousands of teachers as collaborative partners in education,” according to the statement. “This initiative will create adaptive, curriculum-aligned tutoring that adjusts to each student's pace, preferences, and mastery level - ensuring every child, from urban centers to rural communities, receives world-class education tailored to their needs,” it adds.

Bukele hailed the deal, claiming that it “proves that nations can leapfrog directly to the top through bold policy and strategic vision,” while acknowledging that El Salvador is “a testbed for innovation”.

This is not the first time that a government has partnered with an AI firm to use its tools in public schools, with pilot programmes also agreed in Iceland, Estonia, Greece, and the UK, but it is the largest such project to date.

Although the stated aim is to help close learning gaps and help increasingly overworked teachers, the use of AI in schools has led to some concerns, particularly given Grok’s documented history of generating inflammatory and inappropriate outputs, which have been widely reported in international media. Although xAI has apologised for Grok’s outbursts, the company has done little to assuage concerns over the kind of safeguarding features necessary to protect young children from harmful outputs. 

As AI education strategist Dan Fitzpatrick wrote in an op-ed for Forbes published on 14 December, students should not be expected to bear the same innovation risks as other early adopters of technology such as AI. “Responsible AI in classrooms is contingent on transparency, human oversight and clear lines of accountability,” he wrote. “If xAI is to be taken seriously as an educational partner, it will have to prove, not only the new features, but also a far more meaningful safety culture, better accountability mechanisms, and independent scrutiny suitable to the ethical weight of education.”

El Salvador’s public education system is in need of investment to boost human capital and enable Bukele’s drive to make the country a tech hub, but at this stage it is far from clear that rolling out a tool that is still very much in development is the best way to improve education attainment. While the agreement certainly chimes with Bukele’s desire to position the country at the vanguard of digital technology, as he also did in adopting the cryptocurrency bitcoin as legal tender, there is a risk that it does more to curry favour with US powerbrokers like Musk than it does to help Salvadorean children and teachers, who will not have the opportunity to opt out of becoming part of the experiment.