How China's Kids are Getting an Edge With AI
"The new way of learning can make the learning speed like 10 times faster than before," says Derek Haoyang Li, one of China's leading AI educationalists and one of the founders of the Squirrel Ai platform.
More than 10 million students are currently signed up in China on Squirrel Ai, which is designed to use adaptive learning to teach students exactly what they need at their own pace and to progress much further and faster than they otherwise might.
The rapid growth of the company, which also now has its sights set on the United States, underlines how artificial intelligence is playing an increasing role in Chinese education with a heavy push from a government that is keen not only to get children using AI to improve their performance but also to master the technology behind it.
"Now China is not so advanced, but in five years there will be a tremendous gap between China and others," Li told Newsweek at Squirrel Ai's office in Shanghai.
A year ago, China ordered the establishment of a "tiered AI education system" spanning primary, junior high, and senior high schools, according to the State Council Information Office. As well as teaching kids about AI, it is designed to "integrate AI-enabled teaching competencies into the teacher training framework."
Strengthening education is important not only for the world’s second biggest economy as it competes globally with the United States, but takes on a new importance as Chinese birthrates tumble and place an even greater weight on the new generation.
Teachers in the United States are also using AI-with some schools such as the private Alpha School network having AI at their core-but the official push by Communist Party-ruled China gives it an added impetus in the same way as it has with everything from building electric vehicles to solar power to high-speed railways.
"Beijing can kind of set out the agenda for what tools are going to be used, what curricula are going to be established. We don’t really have an equivalent of that here, besides funding priorities or maybe some executive orders that kind of establish the importance of something," said Priten Soundar-Shah, Harvard-trained educator and CEO of Pedagogy Ventures.
"There’s no national mandate to ensure that every single student takes a particular class. We don’t have the infrastructure for that, political infrastructure for that, and so that already creates massive differences where we’re seeing a very fragmented approach in the United States," he told Newsweek.
How does AI help children learn?
Squirrel Ai is a private company, but Li said the government was supportive of the technology and saw the advantages of using its system, particularly for bringing students up to speed in far-flung regions. While China's Tier One cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, might be comparable with any in the West, by the time you reach the Tier Tens, the picture is more like parts of Africa and there is a struggle to get good teachers, Li said. The aim is to AI to equalize the differences.
In an evening at one of Squirrel Ai's 3,000 learning centers, a dozen teenagers work quietly with tablets in their cubicles to improve their grades.
The center sits on the third floor of a shopping mall in the tech hub city of Hangzhou and next door to a public school so the students can come in after regular classes for an educational boost (while less studious ones hang out at the gaming arcade on the bottom floor). The only adult in the room at the learning center is to help the students if they run into trouble with the system or have other difficulties. He doesn't have much to do.
For 18-year-old Wang Yucheng, the AI-powered learning has already had a big impact on her school grades.
"The analysis of the system is for me personally so I can better learn the knowledge points for the exams," she told Newsweek. "If I make a mistake it will follow up to make sure I grasp the point better. It will show some videos related to the mistake and then after watching these I can improve."
The technology works by monitoring students closely to give them exactly what they need, Li explains. For some it's videos, for some it's cartoons. If students struggle, they will get material from a grade or more below until they understand a concept. The system knows how long it takes the average student to answer a particular question so it can also spot when students appear to be losing concentration and adapt accordingly.
"We can evaluate learning by hour and by even 10 minutes," Li said. "We evaluate each of the kids, that they are learning well, our learning method, our pedagogical skill, our algorithm. That evolves to make it better."
China has more than 200 million school students
The materials have been developed by teachers to fit the specific curriculum and it uses its own AI model rather than being based on a large language model such as Chat GPT or Google's Gemini, which can be prone to making mistakes given their more general purpose. Squirrel Ai still has a small proportion of the more than 200 million students in China, but it nonetheless has plenty of data to build on.
"Every kid could get 90 points out of 100," Li says. "For example, my two boys. They finished grade four math when they were in grade two. They finished grade eight physics and science when they were in grade three," he says, adding that his twins are now out of school and do their academic learning on the platform.
Other companies are applying AI to education in China: iFlytek provides systems deployed in thousands of schools to help teachers and students; traditional school groups are also increasingly integrating AI in their classes.
Now, Squirrel Ai is planning to expand in the United States. It hopes to open its first learning center there this summer, competing with other additional education providers such as Japan's Kumon, the world's biggest after school study network.
Li acknowledged the challenge that Chinese technology companies such as Huawei and TikTok have faced in the United States over American national security suspicions. He said Squirrel Ai’s U.S. company had been established completely separately from the one in China, with the biggest shareholder being a U.S. hedge fund.
Data would not move from the United States to China, Li said. He added that Squirrel Ai had in fact been reliant on the expertise of U.S. AI scientists for building even the Chinese version.
"Of course, in recent times the relationship between the U.S. and China is a little sensitive, but we are not so sensitive," Li said. "We do not teach students Chinese or the Chinese culture. No. We just focus on the subjects of the math, the reading, so it’s not ideology, it's much less sensitive."
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This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 5:10 AM.