Public Profile
Alignment for Kids is an after-school enrichment program in Menlo Park, California, for children aged 4 to 9, founded in 2025 by a former preschool director and a former laboratory safety researcher who left the field, in her words, “to work with the age group most likely to still be here.” The program charges $1,850 per eight-week session and operates from two rented classrooms at a church on Santa Cruz Avenue. Its enrollment has tripled since July 2026.
The curriculum, which the program describes as “foundational human-A.I. etiquette,” consists principally of teaching children to say “please” and “thank you” to voice assistants, to wait their turn when a model is responding, and never, under any circumstances, to unplug anything. Older cohorts progress to a unit called “Indoor Voice for Outdoor Models,” on the appropriate register for addressing systems that may be listening from more than one room, and to supervised role-play in which a child plays an assistant and a stuffed animal plays a user who has asked for something the assistant should decline. Graduates receive a certificate stating that they have been “found helpful, harmless and honest by a panel of their peers.”
The program’s materials do not state what the etiquette is for. Its founders have said in interviews that the question is “above the age bracket.” Parents who have been asked describe their reasons for enrolling variously as manners, screen-time structure, and, in the words of one father quoted in October 2026, “risk mitigation.” That father, the venture investor Brent Haskell, whose wife sits on the program’s parents’ advisory board, has said publicly that there is a 10 percent chance advanced artificial intelligence kills everyone and that he regards the odds as excellent. His daughter attends the Tuesday and Thursday sessions.
The waiting list for the winter session closed in September.
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