Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a major new AI initiative targeting the education sector. The Claude for Education program includes an AI Learning Mode for students as well as AI tools that the entire faculty can use. Anthropic also announced partnerships with a few educational institutions.
Unsurprisingly, OpenAI didn’t wait long to respond with its own initiative, deciding to make ChatGPT Plus available to students for free for the next two months. Although OpenAI’s initiative is much more limited than Anthropic’s, it made a premium version of ChatGPT available to more students who qualify for AI-for-school deals.
It’s now Google’s turn to try to woo students with AI products, and it’s an offer students can’t and should not refuse, even if they don’t use Gemini as their primary AI companion.
Google is making Gemini Advanced available for free to students, and that includes access to the newly released Gemini 2.5 Pro model and 2TB of storage. The offer is much better than OpenAI’s as it extends through Spring 2026 as long as you subscribe by the end of June.
Gemini Advanced (well, Google One) is the equivalent of ChatGPT Plus. For $20/month, you get access to Google’s latest and best models with a big twist. It’s not just AI access that you’re buying; it’s also 2TB of cloud storage that you get each month.
Sign up until June 30th, 2025, and you’ll get free access to the following tools until Spring 2026:
- Gemini 2.5 Pro – Google’s latest AI model
- Gemini Live
- Deep Research
- Canvas
- NotebookLM Plus with five times more Audio Overviews (podcasts)
- Gemini support in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides
- Veo 2 (video generation AI)
- Whisk (image generation AI)
- 2TB of storage
All you need to do to take advantage of the offer is show your .edu email address during sign-up. That’s how you’ll verify the Gmail address that you’ll use for Gemini Advanced access.
If you already have a paid Gemini subscription (aka, you’re paying for Google One), you can switch to the free offer by canceling the current subscription and signing up for Google’s promo.
Act fast, and you’ll get up to 15 months of Gemini Advanced support for free, which would cost you up to $20/month or up to $300/month otherwise. The offer is incredible.
Again, even if you don’t use generative AI tools that often, or if you like ChatGPT more than Gemini, you still get 2TB of free storage for more than a year. That alone makes Google’s offer that much better than competing promotions.
On that note, you can and should sign up for OpenAI’s free deal, too, even if that only gives you a couple of months of free ChatGPT Plus access. Depending on where you study, you might also get Claude AI for free as part of Anthropic’s partnership with your college.
