Do we like them?Do we like Sal Khan?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Free education for years and no harmful words or acts found, but we could only open one full article, so the picture is thinner than we like.
Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, the free online learning nonprofit. These days he is better known for his bets on artificial intelligence in schools, and the biggest of them landed this year.
In April 2026 he announced the Khan TED Institute, a joint venture with TED and the testing company ETS. It aims to offer a bachelor's in applied AI for under US$10,000 and will seek accreditation. Google, Microsoft, Accenture, Bain, McKinsey and Replit are the corporate partners shaping the curriculum. He pitched it modestly, saying “Higher education has served many, many people very, very well.”
The part that earns him points is the honesty about the last big bet. In an April 2026 Chalkbeat interview he reflected on Khanmigo, the AI tutor he had predicted would spark a learning revolution. He said that for a lot of students it was “a non-event”. His explanation was that students did not seek out help, so the bot only answered what they asked. He added that the biggest lever is investing in the human systems.
On the harm test we went looking for anything on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, climate or politics. We found nothing harmful from him, no conspiracy slide and no culture-war grifting. We also found nothing either way on his views on those topics, so call this a clean search rather than a glowing reference. The company he keeps is big tech and big consultancies, which is a business question, not a harm one.
The good stuff is the day job. Khan Academy is a free nonprofit, and a 2024 deal with Microsoft made the Khanmigo teaching tool free for US teachers. No court cases or allegations against him turned up, and the criticism we found was about teaching quality and AI hype, not his character. Whether the new degree delivers is a fair thing to be sceptical about, given his own admission on Khanmigo.