Parents have so far been asking whether their child is using AI to write the essay; the newer question is whether their child needs to be present at all for the course to be finished.
In August, Futurism summarised a New York Times investigation describing university students who hand an AI agent their login to the course platform (Canvas and Blackboard are the two named) and let it carry on from there: it takes the quizzes, writes the papers, watches the lecture videos and posts in the discussion threads, all in the student's name. I have not seen the underlying investigation myself, so I am relying on that summary for the details, but the pattern it describes is plausible enough, and technically unremarkable enough, that it deserves a parent's attention well before it reaches a secondary school.
Why this is a different problem from copying
A student who pastes a prompt into a chatbot is still, in some thin sense, doing the assignment: they have chosen the question, read the output (one hopes) and submitted it. An agent that logs in and works through the whole course takes the student out of the loop altogether, which means that the traditional signals teachers rely on, a late submission, an odd phrase, a sudden change of voice, simply never appear, because nothing about the work looks unusual from the platform's side. It is the student's account, from the student's device, at an ordinary hour. According to the same report, the chatbot companies it asked would not refuse a request to write an entire paper, so the tools themselves are not going to settle this on a parent's behalf.
The evidence so far comes from American university and online-course settings, and I would not stretch it further than it goes. A Year 9 pupil in a Kuala Lumpur international school is not, as far as I know, outsourcing a term of IGCSE coursework to an agent. But the same Futurism piece notes that institutions have started pulling back (it mentions a University of Chicago Law School ban on devices in freshman classes and Princeton dropping its Honor Code), and the courses our own children will meet in sixth form and university are the ones where the pressure will arrive first.
The next time your child's school describes an online or take-home component, ask one question: what part of this is assessed with the child in the room, explaining their own work? A school that can answer in a sentence has already thought about it. A school that points to a plagiarism-detection tool has not, because detection works on text, and an agent's text is the student's own account's text.
Is it temporary?
There is a fair counter-argument. N. Ángel Pinillos, in an essay on Substack, argues that the cheating problem is temporary: universities have outlasted the printing press, radio and the internet, students are responding rationally to heavily grade-driven competition rather than failing morally, and supervision of assessment can be extended technologically (he proposes AI-enabled glasses worn during designated assessments). He accepts the privacy trade-off openly, and he is right that the harder question is not enforcement but which skills remain worth assessing at all.
I think he is probably correct that institutions will adapt, though I am less comfortable with the route he suggests, and in any case "temporary" may still mean several cohorts of children whose qualifications are quietly discounted in the meantime. What I find more useful in his essay is that last point: if the work can be done by an agent without the student, the school has to ask whether it was ever measuring what it claimed to measure.
The Deeper Question About Learning
You want to give your child a head start, particularly in education. As a parent I do too, but my educator responsibilities require me to think more about what education really means for my students. What is learning? Five years ago most people would find that question easy to answer. Not so these days, for teachers especially. Students use AI as a shortcut to produce whatever the teacher or parent wants, so where exactly is the learning and what skills do students have or should have? What are they learning them for, jobs that are disappearing or jobs that don't exist yet, if any?
Why this matters for Malaysian families
Malaysian parents are buying international school places, tuition, and increasingly online and blended programmes precisely because the qualification at the end is meant to be trusted by universities abroad. That trust depends on schools being able to say, credibly, that a given grade reflects a particular child's understanding. The sensible position for a parent is neither alarm nor complacency: ask how the school verifies understanding, and notice whether the answer involves the child speaking, explaining or demonstrating in real time.
Questions to take to your child's school
The Principal's AI Toolkit includes plain-language material schools can use to answer exactly these parent questions, on assessment, supervision and where AI belongs in a child's learning.
Get the Free ToolkitWhat This Means for You
An AI agent that can sit through a course on a child's behalf is not yet a problem I would expect most families to meet this term, but it changes what a parent can reasonably ask a school. The question is no longer only whether AI was used, but whether the child was there. Schools that already assess through conversation, oral defence and work done in front of a teacher will find the question easy to answer, and I would be inclined to trust them a little more for it.