In the United States, 57% of teens from families earning $150,000 or more a year now use AI to help with their homework. In families earning less than $50,000, the figure is 43%. Only a year earlier, both groups were level at 39%.
Those numbers come from a new report published on Thursday. RAND, a research group in the United States, surveyed about 1,000 parents and 1,800 teens aged 12 to 18. The surveys were run in spring 2025 and again in May 2026. The Gates Foundation paid for the work.
The report’s main finding is simple. Teens tend to copy what their parents do. Parents with higher incomes have taken up AI fastest, and they are also the most likely to tell their children to use it for school. As a result, a difference in homework habits has opened up between richer and poorer homes. RAND puts it at 13 percentage points, after rounding.
Parents took up AI first
Among all parents in the survey, the share who used AI for work or daily life rose from 54% in February 2025 to 72% in May 2026. Most of that rise came from frequent users, meaning people who use AI at least once a week.
Income made a large difference. In the highest-income families, 84% of parents now use AI. In the lowest-income families, 63% do. The difference between the two groups grew from 15 to 21 percentage points in 15 months. RAND believes higher-income parents use AI more because better-paid office jobs use it more often.
What parents tell their children
RAND asked parents which statement best described what they tell their child about AI and schoolwork. Overall, 56% said they encourage it to some degree. Another 24% said they tell their child not to use it at all for school, and 20% said they had not talked about it.
Again, income mattered. About two-thirds of parents in the highest-income group, 67%, encourage their teen to use AI. Among the lowest-income parents, 45% do. Most parents who encourage it set limits, for example using AI to brainstorm ideas or to check finished work. However, 17% of the highest-income parents said they encourage their child to use AI as much as school rules permit.
A parent’s own habits made a difference too. Among parents who use AI often, 22% encourage their teen to use it wherever possible. Among parents who never use it, almost none do. One result surprised the researchers. About half of parents who agree that AI harms critical thinking, 53%, still encourage their teen to use it for school.
Teens follow their parents
To test the link directly, RAND matched 533 teens with 427 parents from the same homes. Among teens whose parents use AI often, 63% use it for homework in at least some classes. Among teens whose parents never use it, only 40% do.
What teens believe their parents think mattered even more. Of teens who said their parents encourage AI for school, 81% use it for homework. Of teens who said their parents discourage it, 38% still do. RAND found this was linked to AI use more strongly than any other factor it tested, including family income and sex. Only age mattered more.
The matched group is small and was not designed to represent all US families, so RAND advises some caution with these figures. The national sample of 1,807 teens shows a similar link. Of teens with no one encouraging them, 33% used AI for homework. When a parent was among those encouraging them, the figure was between 55% and 77%.
The report also shows that teens hear mixed messages. In May 2026, 78% of teens said at least one type of person had told them not to use AI for school. Teachers were the people most often named as telling them not to, at 57%. Friends were the most common source of encouragement, at 36%.
Parents and teens also do not agree on what was said at home. Among teens whose parents said they encourage AI use wherever possible, only 25% said their parents encouraged them. Another 27% believed their parents were against it.
Why the first attempt matters
RAND’s concern is not that teens use AI at all. It is about when they use it. The report cites research that includes four randomised trials. It finds that learning suffers when AI replaces a student’s own first try at a task, such as writing an essay or solving a maths problem. Using AI to improve work the student has already done does not show the same harm.
One of those trials gave nearly 1,000 high school students in Turkey access to GPT-4 during maths practice. Students who used a plain chatbot scored 48% higher on practice problems. In the exam that followed, taken without AI, they scored 17% lower than students who never had it. A version that gave hints instead of answers removed most of that harm.
This is why RAND does not say whether the new income difference helps or hurts richer teens. If they mostly let AI do the work, their results could fall, which would shrink the long-standing achievement gap between richer and poorer students. If they use AI to check their work, or to plan for college and careers, the gap could grow instead.
Heather Schwartz, the report’s lead author and a vice president at RAND, put it plainly. “It’s not simply a question of whether students should use AI, but how they use it,” she said. Her comments were published with the report. “Teens need guidance on when AI can support learning and when it risks doing the thinking for them,” Schwartz said.
How this fits with other surveys
Other surveys also show that AI is now a normal part of schoolwork. In February, the Pew Research Center reported that 54% of teens in the United States aged 13 to 17 had used a chatbot for help with schoolwork. One in ten said they do all or most of their schoolwork with a chatbot’s help.
Income did not seem to matter much before this. In autumn 2024, Pew asked teens whether they had used ChatGPT for schoolwork. Its survey found no difference between richer and poorer homes. That survey asked about one product, so it is not a direct comparison. Still, RAND’s own data shows that teens in the two income groups used AI for homework at the same rate in spring 2025, and at different rates a year later.
Teens use AI for more than homework. Last month we reported that most teens in a large student survey turn to AI when they feel low. Schools are also having to decide how much access to allow. We have also argued that schools should not be forced to pick between AI tools and web search.
What RAND wants schools, parents and companies to do
- Schools and districts: send families clear, evidence-based talking points on why using AI without limits on a first attempt can harm learning, and use settings on school devices to block general chatbots while students make that first attempt.
- Parents: talk openly with teens about the difference between AI doing their work and AI helping them improve it, and look at settings on phones and tablets that limit open-ended AI use.
- AI companies: build features that tell helpful use apart from handing over the thinking, rather than blocking students outright.
Why it matters: Homework is where most students practise on their own, and AI use there is now split by family income. Whether that helps or harms richer teens depends on how they use it, which is why RAND says parents need to be far more explicit about the rules at home.
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