Khan Academy, the TED conference and testing giant ETS are betting that competency — and not seat time — is the future of college.

Why it matters: Generative AI is scrambling how colleges teach and assess students, with little consensus on what a degree should mean.

Driving the news: The three nonprofits will announce the Khan TED Institute at TED today.

• The interactive online program aims to train students for AI-era jobs while emphasizing human skills like communication and judgment.
• The organizations say the goal is to open for applications in 12 to 18 months and to keep the cost of the program to around $10,000.
• The first planned course of study is a bachelor's degree in applied AI.
• Google, Accenture, McKinsey, Bain and Replit are signing on as launch partners.

Zoom in: Organizers say the institute will focus on three areas of learning:

• Core knowledge in math, statistics, economics, computer science, history and writing
• Applied AI skills, including app development, agent building and financial modeling
• Communication and leadership skills strengthened through tutoring, collaborating and public speaking

Between the lines: AI could deliver personalized instruction in ways classroom professors cannot.

• The program promises to allow students to move at their own pace.
• Students will advance through the Institute based on competency, not by how long they've spent in the program.
• Khan Academy founder Sal Khan said that students could complete their degree in three years or less depending on their skills and prior college work.

Yes, but: Individualized learning has been the promise of ed tech entrepreneurs for decades, but it has yet to deliver lasting improvement at scale.

• Since the launch of ChatGPT three years ago, educators have been working to revamp the classroom and change the way they teach and evaluate students.
• Handwritten blue books have been back for a while, but now that jobs for college grads can be done by AI, the higher education system is still in crisis.

AI has upended education and caused a massive cheating crisis.

• Khan acknowledged this at a recent Common Sense Media conference in San Francisco.
• "Your students are cheating using AI, like all of them are ... your honor codes aren't working," Khan told the audience of educators and administrators.

What we're watching: Whether traditional colleges rethink their models or dismiss this as another ed tech experiment.

AI's rapid advance is raising the risk of both large-scale attacks on financial infrastructure and small, targeted fraud that can drain individual accounts.

Why it matters: Banks have long been the gold standard for cybersecurity — but they need to move faster in an AI world.

• "AI is making fraud so convincing and so cheap to pull off that we need to rethink how money is stored from the ground up," Laura Spiekerman, co-founder of fraud-prevention firm Alloy, told Axios.

Threat level: Fraudsters are already ahead of the banks, several experts told Axios during a panel on financial infrastructure at the HumanX conference.

• Cryptocurrency offers a security roadmap that fiat currency holders could follow, Spiekerman said: hot wallets connected to software for everyday use, and cold wallets that stay offline for longer-term storage like savings.
• The benefit isn't just the diffusion of risk across wallets; each can have different authentication and protections.
• Some fixes are straightforward, said Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder of global payments platform Yuno. Make people use passkeys — don't make it opt-in. Adding friction around large payments, like secondary verification, can provide an extra layer of defense.

Between the lines: AI fraud is a growing concern as models get cheaper and more capable — but the bigger threat is infrastructure-level attacks.

• The risk isn't just theoretical.
• Policymakers and banks are already preparing for worst-case scenarios.

Driving the news: Anthropic has begun a tightly controlled release of its Mythos model, the first AI system that it says could cripple parts of the internet, including major financial institutions.

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Fed Chair Jerome Powell called a meeting with the biggest names on Wall Street to discuss Mythos, first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by Axios.
• The meeting focused on risks of AI-powered attacks on bank systems as well as preventative measures.

Google is funding new research and skills training programs to help prepare workers for the AI economy, according to an announcement shared first with Axios.

Why it matters: Executives say they want workers to be ready for AI as many of them worry it might take their jobs.

Driving the news: Google is convening government, industry and civil society representatives in Washington, D.C., today to discuss AI and the future of work.

• MIT's Ben Armstrong, whose work is backed by Google, recently unveiled research on how companies can use AI to help employees cut down on busywork and support learning and collaboration.

Zoom in: For AI training, the company has three new programs:

• A partnership with the Johnson & Johnson Foundation to equip rural health care providers with tools to minimize time spent on paperwork as the sector faces critical workforce shortages.
• A collaboration with Jobs for the Future to bring together 100 companies to establish new apprenticeships.
• A program with the Manufacturing Institute to train 40,000 workers in AI skills and expand apprenticeships to 15 new regions in the U.S.

Between the lines: Google is looking to define how Washington approaches AI and jobs before policymakers do it for them.

• "AI is not something that is happening to us. It is something that we get to shape," Google's chief economist, Fabien Curto Millet, told Axios, adding that AI's impact on jobs will hinge on what choices companies and governments make today.
• The company has endorsed various bipartisan bills to bolster public-private partnerships for workforce development and get a clearer picture of economic impacts through better data collection.

Yes, but: Those policy ideas may fall short of what unions have in mind for the transition to the AI economy — stronger collective bargaining power and worker protections.

• "For any worker-centered AI strategy, the foundation of that is ensuring that workers can have a union on the job," said AFL-CIO spokesperson Steve Smith. "Because if they don't, they're at the whim of a CEO who may deploy AI in a variety of ways that's harmful to workers."

OpenAI is tightening its ties with Amazon, saying its early investor and partner Microsoft was holding it back.

Why it matters: The ChatGPT creator is under pressure to keep pace with its competitors as the AI economy evolves and its potential IPO approaches.

Driving the news: OpenAI's recently established cloud partnership with Amazon Web Services has generated "frankly staggering" demand from enterprise customers, OpenAI's new revenue chief, Denise Dresser, said in an internal memo.

Friction point: Dresser wrote that OpenAI's Microsoft partnership has been "foundational to our success" but "has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are," which, "for many," is Amazon's less-restrictive Bedrock platform.

Keep reading.

• CNN has hired longtime New York Times chief data scientist Chris Wiggins to serve as head of machine learning and AI science.
• Corporate oversight isn't keeping up with AI adoption at work, a new survey shows. (Axios)

I started off this year's TED with a hands-on session learning to play mahjong.

• Bonus: It was taught by Florian Koenigsberger, who I first met several years back when he was helping Google's Pixel team create a camera that was better at capturing darker skin tones.