It’s only with abstraction that the trouble begins; only when connections become impersonal and automatic; when the owners and operators of internet systems reject the responsibility of standing behind the material they transmit and, especially, promote.

While the school has received high-profile attention for its devotion to AI, including from the hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, what’s gotten less notice is its ties to the administration’s businesses. State filings from as recently as December describe both Legacy of Education (that is, Alpha) and 2HR Learning as subsidiaries of a Texas software firm called Trilogy Inc. While Price is the public face of Alpha, the principal overseeing all of its campuses is Trilogy’s founder, an Austin billionaire named Joe Liemandt who said at a conference last year that he’s spent $1 billion on a mission to transform education using AI. (A Texas business filing by Trilogy in December also names Liemandt as its president and a director; his LinkedIn profile describes him as the chairman.) Price and Liemandt are longtime friends; Price’s husband, Andrew Price, is the chief financial officer of Trilogy and, according to the filings, also holds roles at Legacy of Education and 2HR Learning. The financial arrangements among these entities is unclear, but the filings suggest that Alpha has been serving as a sort of in-house distribution channel for a corporation developing AI products for schools. Trilogy also submitted the initial trademark applications for 2HR Learning and several education products before assigning those rights to 2HR Learning itself. And positions at both Alpha and 2HR Learning were recently posted on Trilogy’s corporate LinkedIn page. ... A publication called Colossus that profiled Liemandt in August said that he had lately been building ed tech products at a “stealth lab” staffed by about 300 people and was preparing to publicly launch a flagship product called Timeback. While the article didn’t name the lab, a Texas filing in early August recorded the formation of a company called TimeBack LLC, with Andrew Price named as a manager. A website for a product called TimeBack that fits Colossus’s description, meanwhile, calls it the system behind Alpha’s schools. And Legacy of Education has a trademark pending for the name. The article describes the product as recording a raw video stream of students, monitoring the “habits that make learning less effective, like rushing through problems, spinning in your chair, socializing,” then generating feedback for kids on how much time they’re wasting and how to do better. Alpha’s privacy policy accounts for this sort of tracking and more, claiming far more access to student information than is typical for companies selling AI to schools, including MagicSchool. Alpha can, for example, use webcams to record students, including to observe their eye contact (partly to detect engagement and environmental distractions). And it can monitor keyboard and mouse activity (to see if students are idle) and take screenshots and video of what students are seeing on-screen (in part to catch cheating). In the future, the policy notes, the school could collect data from sleep trackers or headbands worn during meditation.