RIP Khanmigo & Edtech Industry Dreams of AI Tutors

Never forget.

Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI chatbot tutor, died last week. Because Khanmigo is software, it does not die in the traditional, organic sense. You’ll still find it in the sidebar of Khan Academy practice exercises. But Khanmigo as an idea, as a shorthand for the edtech industry dreams of software that tutors as well as humans, has died, crushed underneath the expectations of its own creator, Sal Khan.

“For a lot of students, it was a non-event,” Khan told Matt Barnum last week in Chalkbeat, referring to Khanmigo’s release three years ago. “They just didn’t use it much,” he continued. Khan Academy’s Chief Academic Officer, Kristen DiCerbo, gave a similar assessment: “So far I am not seeing the revolution in education.” These assessments could not be more different from the expectations Khan set out for Khanmigo at its birth.

Sal Khan brought Khanmigo to life from the TED stage three years ago, just as he did mastery grading 11 years prior and video lectures four years before that, each time predicting an imminent revolution in education. Khan claimed that Khanmigo, and AI tools like it, represented “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.”

Khan’s announcement of Khanmigo generated millions of views and precipitated widespread media attention, a book deal, and a steady flow of philanthropic and government subsidies. Newark Public Schools received $25,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for Khanmigo licenses. Indiana schools could apply for $50,000 in state funds for Khanmigo use. Palm Beach County received a $2,000,000 commitment from the Stiles-Nicholson Foundation to help schools purchase Khanmigo licenses. Microsoft eventually sponsored Khanmigo licenses for every teacher in 49 countries.

These subsidies breathed life into Khanmigo, but they also raised difficult questions. Could Khanmigo breathe on its own? Would schools and districts purchase Khanmigo at an unsubsidized price? If Khan’s predicted transformation were at all imminent, with students learning new ideas at faster rates and teachers experiencing previously unknown levels of support, why wouldn’t Khanmigo sell itself?

Curiously, Khanmigo began to assert itself more aggressively in the Khan Academy student experience. Over its short, three-year life, Khanmigo grew from an unassuming circular avatar in the lower-right corner of Khan Academy, to a circular avatar that would expand and, just one second after pageload, ask the student if they needed help.

In 2026, Khanmigo became an always-on chatbot experience, already activated with or without the student’s invitation. A Khan Academy spokesperson told Barnum they made this change because “students were not seeking out Khanmigo’s help as much as we had hoped.” Some began to wonder why, if its value were so obvious and transformational, did Khanmigo have to assert itself ever more aggressively into the student experience?

Even as it announced itself more loudly to students and teachers, Khanmigo began to perform farther and farther below the expectations of its creator. Sal Khan predicted that by the end of 2024, AI tools like Khanmigo would cut “90% of teachers’ admin tasks.” One year later, after that prediction had clearly not come to pass, he would extend his prediction an extra ten years to 2034. Khan Academy’s user projections also declined dramatically—one month predicting “a million or two million” Khanmigo users in a year and the next month predicting half that with “500,000 to one million students.”

On a recent webinar, Kristen DiCerbo indicated that student usage of Khanmigo was not what Khan Academy wanted. “I will tell you, we see more ‘IDK IDK,’” she said, “more passive kinds of interaction than we would like.” Critics suggested that the difference between Khanmigo and human tutors were vast, with the chatbot unable to draw on a relationship with students, unable to initiate or end conversations with the sensitivity possessed by even quite average human tutors.

At this point, with Khanmigo already struggling to meet Sal Khan’s expectations, critics began to scrutinize Khan Academy’s efficacy research. Laurence Holt dubbed its deficiencies “The 5 Percent Problem,” so called because Khan Academy’s strongest effect sizes (0.26 standard deviations above the mean in a 2022 study, for example) were achieved only after excluding 95% of the study population. In a more recent study, Khan Academy lowered their inclusion threshold significantly, avoiding the 5 Percent Problem, but also watching their effect size boil away to nearly nothing.

Khanmigo was raised with a silver spoon in its mouth, possessing advantages completely unknown to most other edtech chatbot startups. It had some of the earliest access to OpenAI’s generative AI technology. It had the backing of a hyperscalar in Microsoft and abundant cloud computing credits. It had the endorsement of national, state, and local officials. It had the phone number of some of the wealthiest people in the world. If Khanmigo died in spite of those advantages, what hope then should the rest of the edtech industry place in chatbot tutors?

In the past, Sal Khan has blamed teachers for low student Khanmigo usage, saying that teachers “need to figure out ways to engage them more” with Khanmigo. In Chalkbeat, DiCerbo blamed students, saying, “Students aren’t great at asking questions well,” which will come as a surprise to anyone who has ever known a small child. Yes, it’s possible that some of the most inquisitive beings on earth aren’t all that great at asking questions, but it seems more likely that chatbots like Khanmigo aren’t all that great at inviting, understanding, or answering those questions.

These are stages of grief, and Khan, himself, seems to have moved towards “acceptance.” He now says, “I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems,” with technology playing a supporting rather than leading role. This is doubtlessly a more fruitful path for education technology, as edtech historians like Larry Cuban and Justin Reich and edtech critics like Audrey Watters have argued for decades. It remains to be seen, however, if this path will appeal to Khan’s benefactors in the technology industry. Will they be as excited to support human systems as they have been software that tries to abstract humans away from human systems?

Indeed, given that Sal Khan has tried unsuccessfully for nearly two decades to abstract humans away from human systems—first with human explanation, then with human evaluation, and most recently with human tutoring—it seems unlikely that he is the right person now to pivot edtech towards humanity. Instead, it seems more likely that he should sit the next decade out and spend that time learning everything he can about the humans at the heart of the system that, for two decades, he has tried and failed to transform.

2026 Apr 25. Here’s what I think it looks like to pivot edtech towards humanity.