Students Are Deploying AI Agents to Attend, Complete, and "Participate" in Entire Online Courses on Their Behalf

AI agents are now logging into Canvas and Blackboard, watching lecture videos, completing quizzes, writing papers, and posting in discussion forums while students do something else entirely. The New York Times documented the trend, finding that the three most popular AI tools among students — ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grammarly — will each write a full paper on a student's behalf without refusing. None of them stop their models from logging into course management platforms, and all three have ignored educator requests that AI agents identify themselves when operating on those platforms.

AI companies have offered creative explanations for their inaction. Perplexity told the NYT that requiring agents to disclose themselves on learning platforms "would put the student's privacy and security at risk." Professors, meanwhile, are navigating contradictory institutional signals: some universities have signed multimillion-dollar deals with the same AI companies whose tools are completing students' coursework. Princeton has already dropped its century-old unsupervised honor code exam tradition after an AI cheating scandal. Karen Costa, who has taught online for two decades, described reading discussion posts and wondering, "Am I just interacting with bots here?"