Work worth following.

In July 2026, more than ninety student senators from all fifty states gathered in Boston for America's Youth AI Festival and drafted the Students First Act, a student-created framework for how AI should be used in K-12 schools. It passed the mock Senate 82 to 16.

Avery Updike, AI Vanguard's founder and one of California's two student senators, served on the committee responsible for the act's student provisions, helped develop and pass several measures, and presented one on the Senate floor. El Estoque, the student news magazine at Monta Vista High School, covered the act on September 2 and interviewed Avery on why students belong in the room: "A lot of this comes with the intention of ensuring that students are still able to be creative and write their own material and really learn within classrooms."

It is the argument AI Vanguard makes to districts every week, carried into a national student policy process and reported by other students.

Day of AI is a global AI-literacy initiative developed at MIT that brings free, teacher-friendly AI curriculum into classrooms — and puts the question of how young people should learn about AI in front of students, educators, and communities around the world.

Tristan Tjetjep, our Director of National Expansion and Tennessee State Director, represented AI Vanguard at the Day of AI festival as a student speaker — taking the mic to connect the work our representatives do on their own campuses to a much bigger conversation about AI literacy, and showing what it looks like when students aren't just the subject of that conversation, but a voice in it.

It's exactly the kind of room AI Vanguard exists to get students into: where decisions about AI in education are being shaped, with the people most affected present and speaking for themselves.