Access to quality AI is becoming a basic rights issue. The cognitive infrastructure being built right now will determine who gets to participate in culture, in creative practice, in building the world that comes next. We're about to distribute it the same way we distributed everything else: market first, equity as an afterthought.
I tried to get Claude into an art academy.
Not to replace anything. To give students access to a tool that could expand what they're capable of imagining, building, and making. A tool that, used well, doesn't answer questions so much as it makes you ask better ones.
Getting access turned out to be harder than expected.
We've been through this before. The internet was going to democratize everything. It did, partially. But quality of access still correlates almost perfectly with economic privilege. The gap between having reliable broadband and being on a school district's throttled WiFi was never just a connectivity gap. It was a participation gap.
AI is moving faster.
For creative students this is particularly acute. It's not about automating their work. It's about whether they develop fluency with tools that are already reshaping their entire field before they graduate into it.
A design student without real AI fluency in 2026 is like a design student without internet access in 2002. Technically functional. Practically behind before they start.
WHAT WE'RE BUILDING
We're establishing a lab in Amsterdam under The Wolfgang Project. A space where creative students can experiment at the intersection of human experience and technology, where the question isn't 'how do we use AI' but 'what becomes possible when we stop treating it as a premium feature.'
We're building work that doesn't exist yet. In categories that don't exist yet. Using tools that don't exist yet.
If you work at Anthropic and this resonates, I'd genuinely love to talk.
The cognitive infrastructure being built right now will determine who gets to participate in building what comes next. And we're distributing it the same way we distributed everything else: market first, equity as an afterthought.
The same argument that built public libraries applies here. Cognitive tools that determine who participates in culture and economy are not luxury goods.
Access to quality AI is a basic right. We should treat it like one before the gap becomes permanent.
WHAT THE NUMBERS ALREADY SHOW
86%, AI literacy preparedness among students with access to quality AI tools. (Adobe, 2025)
63%, Among those without.
23 points, The gap, already baked in, before most of these students have graduated.
A separate study found affluent students using AI to augment their thinking while lower-income peers use it just to keep up with the material. The gap isn't emerging. It's compounding.
We're at the exact moment where access to quality AI is starting to separate people the same way access to quality education always has.
UNESCO has been clear: without equitable access to AI tools, we risk a generation of learners left further behind, not just economically, but culturally.