Secure, ethical, teacher-led: how Norway built a national AI platform for education

Across Europe, educators and researchers are under pressure. Generative AI tools are proliferating faster than institutions can establish governance frameworks, and most of those tools are controlled by non-EU providers. Compliance is fragmented, practitioners are uncertain about what they can and cannot use, and individual institutions have limited leverage to negotiate meaningful control over their data and tools. 

Norway has developed a service that can answer some of these challenges. 

Sikt AI is a national AI platform operated by Sikt, Norway’s agency for shared services in education and research. Rather than leaving institutions to negotiate individual agreements with global vendors, Sikt AI provides a secure, centralized trust layer where universities and schools can access both commercial AI models and sovereign, self-hosted models, all in an ecosystem with unified sectoral governance. Data stays under institutional control, and privacy is safeguarded through technical architecture and governance. Crucially, the platform is designed so that educators, students, and researchers can develop, share, and adapt their own AI tools across the ecosystem. 

The platform addresses something that ad hoc AI adoption cannot: the need for systematic, user-centric deployment where students can use AI safely, teachers can guide and monitor its use, and institutions retain governance over their data and tools. For the education sector specifically, Sikt AI is designed to give students and teachers safe and pedagogically sound access to AI tools. Sikt holds regular meetings with digital pedagogues, teachers, and other users to understand needs, challenges, and opportunities in real teaching and learning contexts. This ongoing dialogue ensures that the service is developed in close cooperation with the sector, so that it supports high-quality teaching and learning – on the terms of students and educators. 

Sikt AI will be developed further as an open platform where third-party providers can offer services to the education and research sector – lowering barriers for European EdTech companies to enter the market while maintaining rigorous ethical and compliance standards. This creates a trusted environment for both public institutions and private innovators.  

The Sikt AI platform has established a strong presence across Norway, with 36,000 active users from 80 institutions in higher education, research, and primary and secondary schools generating 18,000 interactions per day.

The underlying principles of Sikt AI – sovereignty, openness, pedagogical integrity, and public-private collaboration – are not uniquely Norwegian. They reflect values shared across European NRENs and education systems. We believe this approach can serve as a replicable framework for other countries looking to move beyond fragmented AI adoption towards something more coherent, ethical, and sustainable. 

If your organisation is exploring similar challenges, we would very much like to hear from you at kontakt@sikt.no