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machine learning

ChatGPT use is picking up again, just as students head back to school

Students are returning to AI chatbots in swaths after a summer lull.

9/1/25 10:41AM

Pencil case? Check. Textbooks? Check. Large language model with multistep reasoning capabilities? Check.

With the long weekend signaling the final dregs of summer, students across the country are gearing up for the new term. And, in 2025, back to school for many high school and college students means reconnecting with their study buddy: ChatGPT.

Bot lull summer

As reported by Futurism in August, daily usage of OpenAI’s flagship chatbot plummeted in early June, when summer semesters wrapped up, according to data from AI platform OpenRouter. Based on a 2.5 million-strong user base, peak usage coincided with the middle of finals season on May 27, as users generated 97.4 billion tokens (a unit for data processing equivalent to roughly four English characters).

Soon after, average monthly usage more than halved from May to June, when summer vacation began, to 36.7 billion tokens per day, and remained low throughout July. Now, as a new school year looms, ChatGPT usage is picking back up again.

Chat, eat my homework

Per Futurism, other drops in ChatGPT usage throughout the school year coincided with weekends; a Google report on shopping trends also outlined that searches for “AI laptops” more than quadrupled from mid-April to the end of May, during exam season; and a Pew Research survey from January found that the share of teens who said they use ChatGPT for schoolwork doubled to 26% from 2023 to 2025.

Though even the most esteemed institutes for learning advocate for supporting education with AI tools, the impact that overreliance on the tech could have on skill development, intellectual standards, and research integrity — particularly at the college level — is yet to be seen.

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Why Apple is moving into the lower-cost smartphone and laptop markets

The luxury tech maker is heading down-market.

Man taking picture of Times Square using smart phone, personal perspective view

Ads have entered the chat

Advertisers are crowding into the next digital frontier.

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Anthropic will sue the Pentagon over supply chain risk designation, Amodei says

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a public post that the company will sue the Pentagon after receiving a letter from the Department of Defense officially designating Anthropic as “a supply chain risk to America’s national security.”

Amodei says that the effect of the unprecedented designation for an American company is more narrow than originally described, and that most of its customers would not be affected.

“With respect to our customers, it plainly applies only to the use of Claude by customers as a direct part of contracts with the Department of War, not all use of Claude by customers who have such contracts.”

Amodei says the company does not “believe this action is legally sound, and we see no choice but to challenge it in court.”

The CEO also apologized for statements he made in a leaked internal memo in which he claimed that the company was targeted because it didn’t show “dictator-style praise” for President Trump.

Where things stand with the Department of War

“With respect to our customers, it plainly applies only to the use of Claude by customers as a direct part of contracts with the Department of War, not all use of Claude by customers who have such contracts.”

Amodei says the company does not “believe this action is legally sound, and we see no choice but to challenge it in court.”

The CEO also apologized for statements he made in a leaked internal memo in which he claimed that the company was targeted because it didn’t show “dictator-style praise” for President Trump.

$40B💰

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SoftBank is going to great lengths to double down on OpenAI — including taking on significant debt. After completing a $40 billion investment to become one of the ChatGPT maker’s largest backers, the Japanese conglomerate is now seeking a roughly $40 billion loan with a 12-month term, Bloomberg reports.

The financing would be SoftBank’s largest-ever dollar-denominated deal. The AI investment has helped lift profits, but it is also pressuring SoftBank’s credit profile.

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OpenAI releases GPT-5.4 with more “professional work” skills

Feeling the heat from Anthropic’s success with enterprise customers, OpenAI released GPT-5.4, a new model that excels at “professional work.”

OpenAI says the new model has improved capabilities for “professional tasks involving spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. The result is a model that gets complex real work done accurately, effectively, and efficiently — delivering what you asked for with less back and forth.”

The company says the model has advanced computer use skills and supports up to 1 million tokens of context — a measure of the maximum amount of information that can be read and accessed when generating a response, allowing for more complex tasks.