DeSantis' push for 'AI Bill of Rights' reaches Florida's K-12 schools

Florida lawmakers on Wednesday advanced a sweeping artificial intelligence package, attaching new measures regulating AI usage in schools before sending one of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ top legislative priorities to the Senate floor.

Florida’s broader push for an “AI Bill of Rights” already extends well beyond K-12 classrooms. The Senate bill would establish rights for residents interacting with AI systems, including mandatory disclosures when a person communicates with a machine rather than a human and clear expectations for how companies handle personal and biometric data. If enacted, “governmental entities” will be barred from entering contracts with companies tied to certain foreign countries of concern.

The late-added education provisions — adopted on Wednesday as the bill cleared its final Senate committee stop — would create the state’s first top-down framework granting parents the right to opt their children out of instructional use of AI as the technology rapidly enters Florida’s K-12 classrooms.

Under the amended measure, public and private schools that give students access to “artificial intelligence instructional tools” would have to notify parents before issuing login credentials. Schools must identify the tool, explain its educational purpose and describe how it will be used in the classroom.

The notice must also explain how parents can opt out and review their child’s account information, guaranteeing them the ability to decline participation. In public schools, districts would have to provide an alternative assignment that allows students to meet comparable academic requirements without penalty if a parent opts out.

The amended bill also shifts more responsibility to technology vendors. When student accounts are created, AI companies would need to establish a mechanism for parents to review their child’s account information and activity within the platform.

The proposed legislation carves out definitions for “AI instructional tools” as a distinct regulatory category in Florida law, separating them from consumer-facing chatbots addressed elsewhere in the measure.

Lawmakers are acting as AI bursts into classrooms across the state with little uniform oversight. A recent University of Florida analysis found that fewer than one-quarter of the state’s public school districts explicitly reference AI in their student codes of conduct, and those that do focus mainly on cheating and plagiarism rather than instructional use.

District-to-district policies vary widely. Some are toying with AI-powered tutoring or adaptive learning platforms, and others focus largely on preventing misuse.

Other states have taken a patchwork approach. According to AI for Education, more than half have issued guidance to schools on AI but most have stopped short of codifying parental notice and opt-out rights. Ohio recently mandated districts to adopt formal AI policies by July, while other states have relied on nonbinding advisories.

At the federal level, the Trump administration has emphasized U.S. dominance in AI and is threatening lawsuits targeting what it considers overly burdensome state-by-state regulations. Washington’s posture puts DeSantis and some Florida lawmakers at odds with President Trump over how far individual states should go in imposing their own AI standards.

DeSantis has positioned himself as a leading champion of state-level AI safeguards, sounding alarm bells that the technology can spew misinformation, threaten child safety and erode personal privacy. The Republican governor is urging lawmakers to curb Big Tech’s expansion of AI data centers, arguing they’re thirsty enough to drain the state’s water supply and hike Floridians’ utility bills.

“What we’re doing is really just exercising our core constitutional responsibilities to make sure that people in Florida are treated well, and that their rights and well-being are respected,” DeSantis said earlier this month during an AI roundtable at New College of Florida. “We’ll continue to fight that fight.”

While the Senate has largely embraced the governor’s AI agenda, his regulatory push faces friction elsewhere in Tallahassee.

Echoing Trump, some House leaders and industry groups have warned against overly broad definitions, imposing heavy compliance burdens and whether aggressive state-level interventions run the risk of conflicting with Trump’s policies.

The lower chamber’s proposals to regulate AI usage and data centers have not passed through a single committee. House Speaker Danny Perez, R-Miami, told reporters on Tuesday that he’s wary of reining in data center development, arguing that the federal government should have “first dibs.”

“I’ve been very clear that I think AI is an issue that should be dealt with by the federal government. I have massive concerns with the state’s ability to deal with anything in tech,” Perez said. “I mean, even old-school tech, we haven’t been able to get right here in the state of Florida, let alone what’s in front of us with AI.”

During the Senate bill’s budget committee hearing on Wednesday, lawmakers pointed to personal and media anecdotes about how AI is negatively impacting K-12 students’ mental health and quality of education. Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, said her high school daughter has witnessed those impacts firsthand, and floated placing age limits on AI usage for pre-kindergarten students.

“It blows my mind that we would have any state-funded program in which we were allowing AI to interact with our youngest children,” Grall said. “It can’t replace their need to actually retain your own information, and I feel like that’s really what so many of these tools have done.”

At the same time, Sen. Tom Leek, the Ormond Beach Republican who sponsored the bill, stressed that the new regulations should not impede AI’s ability to foster K-12 learning environments. He said AI companies specialized in education advised on the proposed definitions that “allow the use of AI in classrooms in certain situations without limiting their ability to help students continue to learn.”

But addressing AI’s drawbacks in the classroom is a pressing issue, Leek said. “If your plan is to wait for Congress, God help you.”

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