AI in Schools
Publishers sue Meta over Llama, UNSW launches AI companions
Sunday before a heavy week. Five publishers just sued Meta over what trained Llama, UNSW pushed AI companions out to lonely students, and Tuesday brings both the federal budget and the Canvas ransom deadline.
Cengage, McGraw Hill, and three other publishers just sued Meta over what trained Llama
Five major academic and trade publishers (Cengage Learning, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, Hachette, and Macmillan) plus author Scott Turow filed a putative class action against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg on 5 May. The complaint alleges Meta knowingly downloaded copyrighted textbooks and journal articles from pirate sites including LibGen and Anna's Archive to train Llama, and that Zuckerberg personally signed off on the approach. The plaintiffs' demonstration: when prompted with a short passage from a Cengage calculus textbook, Llama reproduced the rest verbatim. They want statutory damages, a permanent injunction, and an order compelling Meta to destroy the unauthorised copies.
Why this matters: Two of these plaintiffs, Cengage and McGraw Hill, sell directly into Australian universities through bookshops, LMS plug-ins, and courseware bundles. The lawsuit puts the textbook publishers on one side of the AI-training question and the AI tool vendors on the other, and Australian institutions are buying from both. For pro-vice-chancellors negotiating Cengage and McGraw Hill site-licence renewals this year, the new commercial reality is that the publishers will price the AI-training risk into the contract somewhere, either through a no-AI-training warranty, an audit-rights clause, or a higher licence fee. Library acquisition teams should expect those clauses to start landing in renewals from the back half of 2026 onward. NPR on the complaint, and the publishers' joint statement via Hachette Book Group.
UNSW has put two AI companions, Tom and Mia, into student support
UNSW researchers from the Big Anxiety Research Centre and fEEL Lab announced on 4 May that they have deployed bilingual digital companions, Tom (English) and Mia (Mandarin), as a co-designed psychosocial support tool for students experiencing loneliness and isolation. The characters were built with input from Chinese students in UNSW Arts, Design and Architecture, and trained to do the work of a "skilled friend" rather than a chatbot, including noticing when a student is in distress and prompting them to consider what to do next. Professor Jill Bennett's framing: "technology does not replace human companionship but can support, stimulate, entertain and connect."
Why this matters: This is a Group of Eight university putting an AI tool into the wellbeing function rather than the assessment function, which is the conversation almost every other Australian institution has been avoiding. The interesting design choice is the co-design framing, where the companions were built with the cohort that would use them, rather than off the shelf. Vice-chancellors who have spent the year arguing about AI in marking now have a reference point on the other side of the building. The procurement read for student services teams across the sector: there is now an Australian, university-built reference design for psychosocial AI, and the next twelve months of vendor pitches into Australian wellbeing teams should be measured against it. UNSW research announcement, Campus Review's coverage.
The Australian Schools Cyber Challenge has opened its third year
The Australian Schools Cyber Challenge 2026 began on 5 May. The program is structured as four rounds, three virtual rounds of four weeks each plus a three-hour live final at QUT on 29 September, and is open to secondary students nationally. Last year's challenge drew 900 students from 120 schools across every state and territory. The 2026 cohort is targeted to be larger.
Why this matters: ASCC sits in a quieter part of the picture than the LMS-of-the-week breach story, but it is the closest thing Australia has to a structured cyber-careers pipeline starting at school level. For SBMs and curriculum coordinators in independent and Catholic systems, the practical ask is whether your school has registered, because participation is free and the IT department has every incentive to back it. For state-school cyber teachers, ASCC is the most useful curriculum-aligned external assessment available this year, and it pre-positions students for QUT-style cyber pathways. The procurement signal worth noting is that this is one of the few national education programs operating without significant US ed-tech vendor entanglement, which from this week onward is a feature, not a footnote. Australian Schools Cyber Challenge 2026 page at Cyber Pathways.
Tuesday is double-deadline day, the federal budget at night and the Canvas ransom at midnight
Treasurer Jim Chalmers delivers the 2026-27 Budget at 7.30pm AEST on Tuesday 12 May. The same day, ShinyHunters' "leak everything" deadline on the Instructure data lapses at end of day. The two events are not connected, but they will land on Australian education leaders in the same 24 hours. The budget question for the sector is whether cyber-resilience funding for schools and universities gets a named line, given that the Canvas incident has put the Australian education-sector cyber posture on the front pages for ten days running. The Canvas question is whether Instructure has paid (with no public confirmation either way as of Sunday morning) and what happens to the data if not.
Why this matters: For SBMs and pro-vice-chancellors, the operational read is to keep two communication drafts ready for Wednesday morning. One responds to a budget that does or does not name an education cyber line, and adjusts the 2026 funding-application slate accordingly. The other responds to either a paid-and-quiet Canvas resolution or a published-and-loud one, with parent and student notifications pre-cleared by the legal and comms teams. The work this weekend is the pre-positioning, not the reaction. The Nightly on Chalmers in the run-up to Tuesday, and the University of Sydney's Canvas notification page as the standing template most Australian universities are tracking.
The Sunday read is that the AI tools above the classroom and the platforms underneath the classroom are both having their assumptions tested in the same week. Five publishers just told Meta what they think of unlicensed training data. UNSW put a co-designed companion in front of students. ASCC enrolled the next 900 secondary students into the cyber pipeline. And on Tuesday the budget will say what the federal government is going to spend on the rest of it. More on the operational landscape at digitalattitudes.com.au.