- Feb 23, 2026. New AI Agent Logs Directly Into College Platform Canvas to Do Your Homework for You. Frank Landymore. “Called “Einstein,” the AI can even participate in discussions, reply to your peers, write essays, and take notes on recorded lectures on your behalf, its maker Companion.AI claims on its website.”
- Feb 20, 2026. The First Agentic AI LMS Killer is Here. Michelle Kassorla. “Einstein AI Companion promises to complete your Canvas classes”
- May 14, 2025. Bite-sized scams: Bots target California colleges. Michael Fuentes. “Community colleges across California are confronting a troubling rise in scams targeting online classes. Many fake student accounts — often called bots — fraudulently enroll in virtual courses to obtain financial aid. These bots mimic real students by filling out applications, enrolling in classes and sometimes even completing initial assignments using artificial intelligence. But their ultimate goal is simple: collect aid money and disappear.”
Assessment and validation
- Feb 1, 2026. Identifying what our students have learned: a framework for practical assessment validation. Tim Fawns, David Boud, Phillip Dawson. “Universities are responsible for safeguarding the value of qualifications through assessment that generates trustworthy evidence about what students know and can do. Public trust in higher education depends on the credibility of these inferences. Yet, in practice, assessment often rests on inappropriate inferences drawn from misaligned or inadequate evidence. This conceptual article addresses that problem by reframing assessment validity, not as the alignment of outcomes and tasks, but in terms of the challenge of evidencing learning through a series of proxies.”
Hubbub around Einstein.AI
<– Original Einstein page promoting itself as a cheating tool. Courtesy of the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20260222215744/https://companion.ai/einstein
Cecelia Musselman prompted Claude.AI to tell her about the uproar around what happened with Einstein.AI. This was Claude’s response in Feb 2026.
The original pitch (around February 23) was remarkably blunt: Einstein was marketed as a tool that would do students’ homework for them — automatically logging into Canvas, watching lectures, writing essays, completing quizzes, posting on discussion boards, and submitting everything, all without the student lifting a finger. It explicitly promised to work while you sleep, with the company boasting “forget switching between ChatGPT and your LMS — Einstein reads the assignment, solves it, and submits it directly.” Futurism
The backlash was swift and intense. Educators flooded social media with outrage, and the founder, Advait Paliwal, reportedly received threats from educators saying they wouldn’t “sleep well” over it. Futurism The tool went viral, sparking widespread debate about academic integrity.
By today (February 25–26), the website has been significantly reframed. Comparing what you see now to what was reported on launch day, the current page still shows the homework-submission version, but a version of the site is also circulating that repositions Einstein as a “personal tutor” — one that guides students through assignments step by step, helps them understand material, creates flashcards and study guides, and builds on their weaknesses — rather than simply doing the work for them. Companion
In short, the change happened because the original framing was essentially an open advertisement for academic cheating, and the public/educator backlash forced Companion to soften or reframe their messaging to emphasize tutoring and learning support rather than full automation. The product appears to be the work of Advait Paliwal, a 2024 Michigan State graduate, and it’s not a major venture-backed company Inside Higher Ed — meaning reputational pressure hit hard and fast.
Whether the underlying product actually changed, or just the marketing spin around it, remains to be seen.
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