The ostensible coming of artificial intelligence in the post-COVID educational landscape has given rise to significant optimism and critical reflection on the future of education globally. The mainstream techno-optimism of many in the educational community — some scholars included — has been untempered by work in critical scholarship, particularly critical EdTech, which has exposed concerns, such as algorithmic racism (Noble, 2018), the coloniality of datafication (Delahunty, 2024), and its potential to exacerbate the inequities already elided within the neoliberalisation of education (Selwyn, 2024). Despite these concerns the pursuit of acceptable integrations of AI technologies, particularly generative large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, has continued apace within the broad landscape of education. The continued efforts to integrate AI into public education is understandable amidst the motivations of inter-governmental organisations (IGOs) which extol the necessities for school and higher educational curricula to adapt to this sociodigital evolution. For example, the World Bank claims that AI is capable of ‘transforming education at an unprecedented pace, offering game-changing opportunities to personalize learning experiences, support teachers in their daily tasks, and optimize education management’ (Molina et al., 2024, p. 5). These imperatives from IGOs have continued and intensified in the last two years with, for instance, the OECD citing its transformative effect on education so far in ‘raising expectations of more personalised learning, enhanced teaching practices, and more efficient system management’ (OECD, 2026, p. 11). It is understandable that within such contexts, further amplified by the saturation of digital and social media within present day consumer capitalism, that curricular concerns have tended to focus on how best to adapt to the ‘inevitable’ use of generative AI among students. We do not dismiss these concerns or the reality of the continuing evolution and reach of these technologies in educational and social contexts. However, to paraphrase the theorist Langdon Winner, there is a risk within this sociodigital rupture of losing our bearings amidst the phenomenon of technological innovations occluding our vision (Winner, 1978). In this work we aim to focus more so on the politics of AI in education (AIED) and chiefly the emerging impacts this is having and will have on educational policy and practices. Moving beyond a concern with the nano and micro spaces of curriculum we instead focus on the supra and macro levels, and the emerging politics of AIED along with its effects.

Situating the rise of this technology within the sociopolitical conditions of contemporary neoliberal policyscapes of education offers a critical entry to interrogating some of the logics which help to render sense to the techno-optimism of some educational actors. Borrowing from Sheila Jasanoff, the sociotechnical imaginary engendered in an era of AI centres critical gaze upon the ‘institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures’ which are structured on ‘shared understandings of forms of social life’ (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, p.4). This theoretical perspective further signals the social implications of algorithms as well as the politics of algorithmic futuring which always seek, in establishing temporal anxieties about possible futures, to intervene in the present (Kitchin, 2023). For education and curricula within an era of ‘molecular biopolitics’ (Rose, 2007), datafication holds a central role formalising the authoritarian neoliberal restructuring of policy, and as this work will show, rendered intelligible through the pervasiveness of the ‘psychological-complex’ (psy-complex). The psy-complex refers to the assemblage of suppositions of personal and social responsibilities and relations provided by psychology (Gillborn & Delahunty, 2025). In this contribution we analyse the centrality of the psy-complex as a structuring and governing force within the new sociotechnical imaginaries sketched by the dominance of artificial intelligence in current educational discourse. 

In this work we build upon our ongoing efforts to analyse and excavate the politics of the psy-complex within contemporary educational governance. The psy-complex serves an ontologising function which in colonising frames of understanding through its assemblage of positivistic ideologies, obscures systematic inequalities and oppression (Parker, 1994). As our previous work has shown in relation to educational policy (cf. Gillborn & Delahunty, 2025), the psy-complex renders unproblematic ‘scientific and objective’ data as the solution to educational problems, imputing a positivistic logic within educational policy/curricula concerns. As Henry Giroux has argued, the infusion of positivistic ideology into public education and curricula is fundamentally anti-democratic (Giroux, 2020) and as we will show in this paper, the emerging politics of AIED observable among supra-level policy actors is both supported and intensifies the psy-complex in educational policy. In this work we take a critical psychological perspective, and critical post structural policy analytic approach, to critique current policy guidance on AI from intergovernmental organisations to illustrate the governing mechanisms of the psy-complex and its intensification through datafied technologies, like AI. In particular we analyse recent publication such as the OECD’s AI Capability Indicators and its Digital Education Outlook 2026 (OECD, 2025, 2026) to excavate the workings of the psy-complex that, rather than newly emerging in the policy landscape, have found new means of intensification in education today through AIED.

Our analysis demonstrates the continuing evolution of the psy-complex within contemporary educational policy discourses, amplified by the recent surge in AIED across the globe. In addition to the positivistic data-driven educational rationalities that the psy-complex, through algorithmic futuring, engenders within AIED motivations, there is an increasing individualisation of learning and educational responsibilities. These continue to distract from systemic transformational urgencies, eliding the inherent anti-democratic nature of positivistic datafication core to the functioning of these technologies. The pressing dangers for the subject of public democratic education and the potential for intensifying authoritarian neoliberal fascism through the governing logics of IGOs such as the OECD are delineated and considered in relation to concerns for democratic citizenship. We conclude with a discussion centring on the need to affirm a radical democratic response to these politics, which includes engaging politics of refusals, based on ethics relationality and care fundamental to the ethos of contemporary public curricula.

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