Day: July 23, 2025

• A West Point official said in December that Pete Hegseth hadn’t applied to the military academy.
• Hegseth proved he had been accepted, prompting attacks from Republicans and calls to investigate.
• Internal emails released to BI show staffers had to query an “out-of-use database” to find the record.

Recently released West Point records shed new light on exactly how the December snafu over Pete Hegseth’s admission to the prestigious military academy happened.

On the morning of December 11, Hegseth wrote on X that the investigative news website ProPublica was about to run a “knowingly false” story saying that he hadn’t been admitted to the US Military Academy, where many of America’s Army officers are trained.

ProPublica denied Hegseth’s claim, saying it had simply asked Hegseth to respond to a statement by a West Point public affairs official who told the news outlet that Hegseth hadn’t even applied, much less been admitted.

At the time, Hegseth and his allies used the incident to blame West Point and the media. The new records show the mistake was West Point’s, which neglected to review an old archive of the academy’s thousands of past applicants before the controversy took off.

Internal emails, released to Business Insider under the Freedom of Information Act, showed West Point staffers exchanging emails on December 10 about Hegseth’s claim to have been admitted, after he produced a letter as proof.

“Look what they now provided??” Theresa Brinkerhoff, a public affairs official, wrote to another West Point employee.

In another email thread, an employee whose name was redacted wrote, “anyone can generate an acceptance letter…doesnt mean its legit.”

“Very true,” Brinkerhoff replied.

By the afternoon of the 10th, West Point staff seemed to have realized their mistake. “Hes in there,” an employee whose name was redacted wrote in an email. “Its in an old archived table,” the person said, typing out a line of search query language to demonstrate how the admissions record could be found.

“The record shows that he declined the offer,” the employee wrote.

Hegseth ended up going to Princeton, where he studied politics, played basketball, and joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He served in the Army National Guard after graduation and moved into conservative activism and media jobs.

Hegseth has been a magnet for criticism in his six months as defense secretary. His nomination to lead the Pentagon was looking uncertain last December amid allegations of alcohol abuse and mistreatment of women. Hegseth denied the claims and promised to stop drinking.

Terrence Kelley, the head of West Point’s communications office, apologized to ProPublica the afternoon of the 10th. “My sincere apologies for the incorrect information,” he wrote. “It was inadvertent.”

Hegseth apparently didn’t get the memo. He posted at 8:10 am the next day that ProPublica was about to run a false story.

Kelley told colleagues on December 11 that it was important that they get “official word” to ProPublica that Hegseth was telling the truth. “Confirming Hegseth’s claim probably kills any interest Propublica has in the story but the longer we delay response, the more likely that becomes a story,” he wrote.

In a later email to ProPublica, which never ran a story about Hegseth’s admission, he called the flub an “honest mistake.”

By the afternoon of the 11th, West Point’s press office had received inquiries about Hegseth’s post from eight other media outlets. That same day, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas asked the school’s leadership to look into how the statement was made.

“The academy takes this situation seriously and apologizes for this administrative error,” West Point told media outlets.

“Following the release of inaccurate admissions information last December, West Point implemented additional guidance for the proper review and release of any information to outside parties,” Kelley, the West Point spokesperson, told BI. “We regret the error and are committed to ensuring it does not happen again.”

“Reporters do their job by asking tough questions to people in power, which is exactly what happened here,” a spokesperson from ProPublica said. “Responsible news organizations only publish what they can verify, which is why we didn’t publish a story once Mr. Hegseth provided documentation that corrected the statements from West Point.”

The Pentagon and Cotton didn’t respond to requests for comment.

• OpenAI partners with Instructure to integrate AI into classroom instruction.
• Instructure’s Canvas app will use AI to enhance teaching and student engagement.
• AI tools will assist in creating assignments, assessing students, and managing admin tasks.

When ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2023, students frequently used the AI chatbot to cheat on homework assignments. Two years later, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is taking a more official role in education.

On Wednesday, OpenAI and edtech company Instructure announced a partnership that brings generative AI into the heart of classroom instruction.

Instructure is the company behind Canvas, a learning app that’s used by thousands of high schools and many colleges. If you’re a parent, like me, you’ve probably seen your kids checking for homework assignments and grades in this app on their phones.

Going forward, AI models will be embedded within Canvas to help teachers create new types of classes, assess student performance in new ways, and take some of the drudgery out of administrative tasks.

For students, this provides a way to use AI for school work without worrying about being accused of cheating, according to Melissa Loble, chief academic officer at Instructure.

“Students actually do want to learn something, but they want it to be meaningful and applicable to their lives,” she added in an interview. “What this does is it allows them to use AI in a class in an interesting way to help them be more engaged and learn more.”

The edtech market is crowded, and many players are integrating generative AI into workflows. Last year, Khan Academy, a pioneering online education provider, launched Khanmingo, an AI powered assistant for teachers and students that uses OpenAI technology.

The LLM-enabled assignment

At the center of the Canvas transformation is a new kind of assignment. Instructure calls it the LLM-Enabled Assignment. This tool allows educators to design interactive, chat-based experiences inside Canvas using OpenAI’s large language models, or LLMs.

Teachers can describe their targeted learning goals and desired skills in plain language, and the platform will help craft an intelligent conversation tailored to each student’s needs.

“With Instructure’s global reach with OpenAI’s advanced AI models, we’ll give educators a tool to deliver richer, more personalized, and more connected learning experiences for students, and also help them reclaim time for the human side of teaching,” said Leah Belsky, VP of Education at OpenAI.

Instructure and OpenAI are aiming for a learning experience that better fits how students interact with technology these days — one that mirrors conversations with ChatGPT, but grounded in academic rigor.

For instance, a teacher could conjure up an AI chatbot in the form of John Maynard Keynes, powered by OpenAI GPT models. Students can chat with this AI economics avatar and ask questions such as what might happen if more supply is added to a particular market.

AI in student assessment

As students work through these AI-powered experiences and prompts, their conversations are compared with the teacher’s defined objectives and funneled back into the Gradebook, offering real-time insights into student understanding. This gives educators more insight to evaluate the learning process, rather than just students’ final answers.

In Canvas, the Gradebook is a centralized tool that helps instructors track, manage, and assess student performance across assignments, quizzes, discussions, and other activities within a course.

Having OpenAI models involved in the assessment process may raise eyebrows among some educators and parents. However, there will always be a human in the loop, and teachers will have full control over assessments and grades, according to Loble.

Help with scheduling and parent questions

Instructure has also developed an AI agent that helps teachers tackle heavy admin tasks in Canvas. For instance, if Porsche broke her ankle riding her horse and she asks for more time to do homework, her teacher can ask the digital agent to go into the app and bump deadlines for Porsche and all her relevant classes.

This AI agent can even help teachers respond to parent questions. Why did Porsche get a B on her economics test? Her parents might want to know at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. The Canvas agent can summarize parent questions like these for teachers, potentially spotting similarities and trends within the messages. The teacher can then ask the agent to write a response to the relevant parents.

Again, a human is always in the loop: In this case, the teacher would check the agent’s message and edit or re-write it before sending.

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@busienssinsider.com.