University President Paul Alivisatos announced Tuesday that the University will offer students free enterprise access to Claude, Anthropic’s flagship series of large language models (LLMs), before the start of the 2026–27 academic year in September. University faculty and staff will gain access in July, Alivisatos said.
The Claude Enterprise plan gives users access to all of Anthropic’s active LLMs. These models can be accessed through the standard chatbot interface as well as through Claude Code and Claude Cowork, both of which allow the model to directly read, create, and modify files in any user-designated folders and workspaces. UChicago Claude accounts will also support “improved integration with university resources and tools” and provide stronger data privacy and security guarantees than private user accounts, Alivisatos wrote in an email to students and staff.
Alivisatos added that the University community should remain “skeptical, ethical, and ambitious when it comes to AI,” noting that “the University has a duty of care” to teach students “how to think with machines, how to think without them, and how to think about them.”
He also announced the formation of two faculty committees on AI: one on AI and academic life, to be chaired by William Hubbard, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Law and Economics; and an advisory body on AI and education, to be chaired by Emily Lynn Osborn, an associate professor of history and the College.
UChicago does not currently have a University-wide classroom AI policy. Instructors have the ability to set course-level policies on acceptable AI use, including the right to prohibit it outright, per resources linked in Alivisatos’s email.
The University did not immediately respond to detailed questions about usage limits, chat history monitoring, or the expected duration of the partnership with Anthropic. Anthropic did not immediately respond to questions about the terms of its partnership with the University or whether specific privacy or model training arrangements had been outlined.
Alivisatos said that the earlier access for faculty and instructors would give them “the opportunity to do more specific planning that takes this expanded access into account.” He added that dedicated AI training and educational programming would be available for staff.
The announcement follows a $50 million donation by Joseph (A.B. ’78, M.B.A. ’80) and Rika Mansueto (A.B. ’91) in April supporting AI research at the University.
Since September 2024, students and faculty have had free access to PhoenixAI, a UChicago-specific platform currently built on OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 and 4.1 models. All faculty economists at UChicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics have also had Claude Enterprise access since July 2025 as part of a joint research initiative with Anthropic to study the impact of AI on the economy and labor markets.
With the new Anthropic partnership, UChicago joins a growing number of elite universities that have struck access agreements with AI companies. Dartmouth College has offered students Claude Enterprise access through a partnership with Anthropic since fall 2025; at the University of California, Berkeley, active students, faculty, and staff have had access to Google Gemini since 2025; and Duke University began offering students access to premium OpenAI models last September.
The goal of the agreement, Alivisatos said, is to “enable our community to find the best paths forward in the domains of research, learning, and operations with informed experience and a spirit of experimentation—in ways that will ultimately strengthen the University for the better.”
Milkman / Jun 4, 2026 at 10:04 am
For once it’s good to see our limited AI budget put to good use. Everybody benefits from this. When you piss it on those grifters in CS/DS passing themselves off as world leaders in AI, only they benefit.