Kazakhstan has joined the inaugural global cohort of OpenAI’s Education for Countries initiative alongside Estonia, Greece, Italy (CRUI), Jordan, Slovakia, Trinidad & Tobago, and the United Arab Emirates. The government formalised the partnership through OpenAI, Freedom Holding Corp., and regional EdTech partner Bilim Group, following a memorandum of cooperation signed during President Tokayev’s November 2025 visit to the United States.
Under the arrangement, 165,000 ChatGPT Edu licences are being distributed free of charge across Kazakhstan’s public education system: 100,000 for preschool, secondary, technical, and vocational educators; 62,800 for higher education administrators and faculty; and 2,200 for participants in the Astana Hub innovation ecosystem. Nationwide training programmes in cooperation with OpenAI specialists began in January 2026, covering practical AI use in teaching, administration, and research. The initiative is privately financed by Freedom Holding, with no state budget allocation.
Separately, Kazakhstan has signed a partnership with MIT to offer AI training at schools, reinforcing the earlier national education framework (2025–2029) which already integrates AI into Digital Literacy and Informatics subjects at all school levels.
Who it affects: Approximately 163,000 teachers, lecturers, and administrators across Kazakhstan’s entire public education system; Astana Hub members; school students as the downstream beneficiaries of better-equipped teachers.
Relationship to existing programmes: This deepens commitments already documented in Kazakhstan’s National AI Education Framework (2025–2029), the AI Governance 500 programme, and the AI-Sana initiative (targeting 450,000 students and teachers). It substantially increases the government-facilitated supply of free AI tools to educators.
What is notably missing: The ChatGPT Edu licences are government-facilitated but privately funded, and access is restricted to educators rather than the general public. No independent evaluation of training quality or outcome metrics has been published. The programme does not create new binding legal obligations on schools beyond existing framework requirements.