America Is Building Super Intelligence. Who Is Training Every Student to Command It?

The missing piece of the national plan costs about 74 cents a student.

By: Artificial Intelligence Institute

At the White House's October 8 science summit, the Trump administration used the language of super intelligence, SI, to describe the capabilities it hopes to advance in scientific discovery and national competitiveness. That ambition is bold. It deserves an equally ambitious investment in the people who will use those systems.

Here is the gap. 78% of students were already using AI before anyone taught them how, and only 13.6% had any guidance. Most use it to get answers. That is cognitive offloading: the thinking moves to the machine, and the habit hardens.

The AI Institute built the fix. MACH 5 is a five-hour, five-lesson behavioral program built on five behaviors:

THINK → FRAME → QUESTION → VERIFY → COMMAND

Over two school years across more than 20 school sites, the Institute's own results show students moving from answer-seeking toward questioning, verification and ownership of their thinking. Students using AI the right way rose from 15.8% to 88%. Students verifying what AI tells them rose from 14% to 89%. Students using it safely rose from 14% to 90%. And the approach has travelled upward: a struggling third-year aerospace engineering student used Professor Atlas and the program and reached 95% and 93% in his toughest classes. These are first-party results, open to independent evaluation.

The proposal is called the 74-Cent Moonshot: make foundational AI readiness training available to every K-12 student in America at no cost to school districts. Spread across the national student population over ten years, the cost is about 74 cents per student, roughly the cost of a pencil.

The Institute has been invited to brief White House staff in person on October 15. A briefing is not an endorsement, and the Institute does not claim one. But the question it will bring is simple: America is investing in extraordinary intelligence. Who is training the people who will command it?

The country's greatest AI superpower may be millions of people trained to use it well.