Education & Student Safety AI
Khanmigo
Medium riskKhan Academy's AI tutor and teaching assistant: a student-facing guide that coaches rather than answers, plus teacher tools, offered to families and through district partnerships.
Is Khanmigo safe for confidential data?
Khanmigo is one of the more carefully designed student-facing AI tutors: Khan Academy states student data is not used to train the underlying models, chat logs are visible to teachers and parents rather than private to the student, and interactions flagged by moderation trigger alerts to adults. The catch is in the paperwork — Khan Academy's terms place responsibility for FERPA and COPPA notices and consent on the school personnel who create student accounts, so a school that rolls it out without doing that consent work is carrying compliance risk the product's safety features do not remove. Districts get DPA coverage through a formal Khan Academy Districts partnership; informal classroom sign-ups do not.
Risk by plan
The same product often carries very different terms depending on the tier — consumer plans are where the exposure concentrates.
Sign-up is 18+; children get access only through a parent account, with parent-visible chat logs. Consent flows through the parent, not a school.
Accounts are school accounts under a DPA asserting FERPA and COPPA compliance — but the terms still require school personnel to provide required notices and obtain parental consent.
Data handling
Training on inputs
Khan Academy states Khanmigo does not allow LLM providers to train on student data, and student names and personal information are not shared with the model providers.
Retention
Chat histories are retained and deliberately surfaced to teachers and, for family accounts, parents; district partnerships govern retention and deletion through the DPA. Khan Academy publishes deletion request processes for accounts.
Residency
U.S.-hosted; no published Canadian residency option. Canadian schools should treat it as a cross-border transfer in PIAs — a live requirement for BC public schools under FOIPPA s.69(5) and a theme of the privacy commissioners' October 2025 edtech resolution.
Compliance
- SOC 2Not verified
- GDPR / DPAConditional
- HIPAA BAANo
Certifications typically apply to specific tiers and contracts — confirm scope in writing before relying on them.
New to these frameworks? See our plain-language guides to SOC 2 and the other AI compliance standards.
Enterprise controls
- District DPA via Khan Academy Districts
- Teacher visibility into student chat logs
- Moderation with escalation alerts to adults
- Rostering / SSO through district deployment
Frequently asked questions
Is Khanmigo safe for students?
It is designed for supervised student use: the tutor refuses to just hand over answers, conversations are visible to teachers and parents, flagged interactions generate alerts, and Khan Academy states student data is not used for model training. No student-facing chatbot is risk-free, but Khanmigo's oversight model is the one most district policies are asking for.
What is Khanmigo's age requirement?
Sign-up requires being 18 or older. Under-18 students can only use it through a parent account (a parent can add up to 10 children) or through a school district partnered with Khan Academy — there is no direct child sign-up.
Who is responsible for FERPA and COPPA consent when a school uses Khanmigo?
Per Khan Academy's terms, the school is: when school personnel create accounts for underage students, Khan Academy assumes required notices have been given and parental consent obtained. That term is standard in edtech but frequently missed — a teacher enrolling a class outside a district partnership, without a consent process, leaves the school holding the compliance gap, which is the same shadow-adoption pattern districts face across classroom AI tools.
Policy changelog
- Initial entry published from Khan Academy's published terms, privacy documentation, and cited coverage.
Sources
- Khanmigo product and FAQ page
- Khan Academy terms of service
- Khan Academy Districts privacy and security explainer
This profile summarizes the vendor's published policies as of the verification date. It is not legal advice.
Khanmigo is probably already in your organization.
Sanitized AI shows you who is using it and redacts sensitive data from prompts before it leaves your control.
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