Artificial Intelligence Institute Heads to Washington as White House Pushes K-12 AI Education Forward
Updated: 4 days ago
AI Institute leaders Richard Awni, Russell Knight, PhD, and Brian Taylor, PhD, will travel to Washington on October 15 for a White House AI education briefing as the administration accelerates work on AI literacy, critical thinking and the emerging era of Super Intelligence.
Official White House gallery: President Trump hosts a Super Intelligence luncheon, Sept. 29, 2026.
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 11, 2026 — The Artificial Intelligence Institute will travel to Washington on October 15 for a White House AI education briefing focused on one of the most consequential questions now facing American schools:
How do we make students more capable with AI, not more dependent on it?
Richard Awni, Russell Knight, PhD, and Brian Taylor, PhD, will represent the Institute, bringing perspectives from field implementation, advanced AI systems and institution-building in education.
The meeting comes as the federal government accelerates its AI education agenda.
In April 2025, President Donald Trump created the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education and directed federal agencies to expand K-12 AI literacy, critical thinking, educator training and public-private collaboration.
The Institute strongly supports the decision to move early.
Students did not wait for policy.
They did not wait for school systems.
They already have access to increasingly powerful intelligence systems.
The question is whether adults teach them how to use those systems without surrendering judgment, authorship, verification and independent thought.
That is the problem the AI Institute has been working on in the field. In the Institute’s classrooms, 78 percent of students were already using AI before anyone taught them how, and only 13.6 percent had any guidance. After a roughly five-hour program, students using AI the right way rose from 15.8% to 88%, in the Institute’s own field data.
Across two years of school-district implementation in Los Angeles, the Institute has developed a behaviorally structured approach designed to move learners from cognitive offloading, asking AI to do the thinking, toward cognitive amplification: using AI to extend the learner’s own reasoning, creativity and problem-solving.
The operating principle is simple:
Think First. AI Helps Second.
The Institute’s program for putting that into practice is MACH 5: five hours, five lessons, five behaviors, one goal, keep the human in command.
President Trump’s September 29 executive order directed federal agencies to adopt the term Super Intelligence, and NASA has already begun incorporating SI into mission planning, science, research and autonomous systems.
The AI Institute’s view is straightforward:
Super Intelligence needs human readiness.
The machines are becoming more powerful. The humans using them must become more capable too.
That means teaching students how to question, direct, verify and remain accountable for what increasingly capable systems produce.
Awni will bring the Institute’s field and implementation perspective. Knight, a senior AI technologist with more than 26 years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will address technical trust, verification and the limits of intelligent systems. Taylor, a Princeton graduate and former NBA player, will bring decades of experience building educational institutions and working across youth, schools and policy.
The Institute is honored by the invitation and looks forward to contributing what it has learned from the field.
America does not need to choose between embracing advanced intelligence and protecting human thinking.
It can do both.
That may be the most important lesson AI education can teach.
_______________________________________________________________________
About the Artificial Intelligence Institute
The Artificial Intelligence Institute teaches people across ages, grades and professions how to remain in command of increasingly powerful intelligence systems.
Its proprietary behavioral architecture trains learners to move from cognitive offloading to cognitive amplification, questioning, directing, verifying and controlling the technology rather than surrendering thinking to it.
Think First. AI Helps Second.
The goal: turn advanced intelligence into a personal superpower without surrendering human judgment, authorship or control.
Learn more: artificial-intelligence-institute.com
Follow the Frontier
Follow the Artificial Intelligence Institute on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook for Frontier News Desk reporting, field observations, AI-readiness insights and emerging developments in human-AI interaction.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ethicalai-institutes/ | Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100094622704133 |
Family First Foundation
The Artificial Intelligence Institute grew from more than two decades of Family First Foundation work with children, families, schools and communities.
Follow Family First Foundation for the human, family and community side of this work and follow the Artificial Intelligence Institute for the frontier of AI readiness and human amplification.
Comments