AI WATCH
Musk / xAI, Amodei / Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Singularity Salon, and the big AI communities abroad. News, videos and official blogs, collected automatically every 30 minutes onto one page.
The second half is about what a university email address unlocks: the AI tools that become free, the ones that become half price, and the ones that quietly stopped working — each with the date we checked.
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In the past year Cursor closed its one-year free student program to new sign-ups and Perplexity's free student campaign expired. Every entry below carries the date we verified it. Check the linked page before you apply.
Items collected in the last 7 days. The darker segment is the last 24 hours. Click a name to filter.
From Google News (English and Japanese), official YouTube RSS feeds and the labs' own blog feeds. We store titles and links only — never the body text.
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Verified on official pages on 2026-09-13. Written from Japan, so the notes say when a Japanese .ac.jp address qualifies. FREE works as-is DISCOUNT cheaper VIA UNIVERSITY only if your school has a contract NOT AVAILABLE not right now
For university students aged 18–24 living in Japan (similar offers exist in other countries; the US gets Google AI Pro instead). Verify your school email (.ac.jp) through SheerID and Google AI Plus — normally ¥725/month — is free for 12 months: upgraded Gemini app features, higher NotebookLM limits, 200 GB of storage. Sign-up deadline: 2026-12-31. A payment method is required and billing starts in month 13, so put the cancellation date in your calendar.
Apply: one.google.com/ai-student — checked 2026-09-13 (ITmedia report 2026-08-20; Google's student page)
Verify with a school email or enrollment document. GitHub Copilot Pro (normally $10/month) is free for as long as you're enrolled, and its auto model selection includes Claude Sonnet/Opus and GPT models. Also JetBrains IDEs, $100 Azure, $200 DigitalOcean, a free domain and more. Benefits unlock up to 72 hours after verification.
Apply: education.github.com/pack — checked 2026-09-13
The "Deep Learning Foundations", "Large Language Models" and "GCI" (data science) courses are free for students (each term, with selection). Since 2026 there's also "GCI World", open to students anywhere online. Lectures are in Japanese; if you miss the enrollment window, the lab periodically publishes the slides for free.
Enroll: weblab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/lecture — checked 2026-09-13 (autumn 2026 course list published 2026-09-08)
If your university licenses Microsoft 365 Education, Word/Excel/Teams are free with your school account. Copilot on the web is free for everyone, and Microsoft's student page occasionally adds extra offers. Terms depend on your school and the season, so start with your IT center's page.
Info: Microsoft Education — checked 2026-09-13
The free student campaign ended in January 2026. Now, verifying a school email via SheerID gets you about 50% off ($10/month) plus the first month free. Academic domains beyond .edu are accepted, so .ac.jp should pass; if it doesn't, contact support.
Apply: perplexity.ai/students — checked 2026-09-13
Sign up with a school email and you get Plus-level features for free. Notion AI is a separate paid add-on and is not included. Still a solid base for notes and assignment tracking.
Apply: Notion for Education — checked 2026-09-13
There is no individual student discount in Japan as of September 2026. OpenAI's back-to-school offer (Plus free for four billing periods) is for students at US degree-granting institutions. If your university runs ChatGPT Edu, you can sign in with your school email. Otherwise the free tier or the Go plan is the realistic option.
Terms: OpenAI Help (back-to-school offer) — checked 2026-09-13
No individual student discount and no .edu sign-up form. What does exist: Claude for Education if your university has a contract (sign in with your school account), API credits for student builders (application-based), and Claude models inside Copilot via the GitHub Student Pack above. Anyone can drop Pro from $20 to $17/month with annual billing.
Info: anthropic.com/education — checked 2026-09-13
Closed to new sign-ups on 2026-06-25. Already-verified students keep the rest of their term; no re-verification. The free Hobby plan is open to everyone. Graduate students and researchers can apply for credits through the separate academic program. Event promotions may appear from autumn, so glance at cursor.com/students now and then.
Status: cursor.com/students — checked 2026-09-13
Google Colab (GPU notebooks), Kaggle (30 GPU hours a week, competitions, datasets), Hugging Face (models, datasets, free courses), the Gemini API free tier, and the free tiers of Claude / ChatGPT / Gemini. Everything you need to get your hands dirty before joining a lab is already here.
Checked 2026-09-13
Free ones first; prices are noted where they exist. "Information comes to you" places and "you go and read" places are kept apart.
This list is the substance of the site. Want something added? Leave a comment on the portal.
A Cloudflare Worker reads Google News RSS searches (English and Japanese), official YouTube channel RSS feeds, the OpenAI / DeepMind / Hugging Face blog feeds and LessWrong's curated feed every 30 minutes. Posts on X aren't read directly (the API is paid); we catch them once they turn into articles.
Title, link, timestamp, source name. No body text, no images (video thumbnails come straight from YouTube). Items older than 14 days drop off.
Written from each service's official page and press coverage read on 2026-09-13. Terms change monthly. If the table looks stale, the "Student offers & discounts" track in the feed above will usually have the newer story.
No automatic summaries. This is a tool for scanning titles and deciding for yourself what to read.
This site organizes information and does not guarantee any service's terms; eligibility is decided by each provider. Articles and videos belong to their publishers and channels; we show titles and links only. Inclusion does not imply endorsement.