Gates of the Royal Airforce College in Cranwell, UK in 2011. Adapted from photo by Richard Croft (CC-BY-SA)Universities are moving rapidly from debating artificial intelligence to buying it. That shift is understandable. Students already use generative AI extensively, employers increasingly expect graduates to understand it, and leaving access to the best systems dependent on who can afford which commercial subscriptions creates obvious problems of imbalance.In the United Kingdom, Universities UK has now called for AI tools to be accessible to every undergraduate student. In Australia, UNSW Sydney has announced one of the largest higher education deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, providing ChatGPT Edu to more than 80,000 students and staff.These initiatives point toward a future in which institutional access to AI becomes as normal as access to a learning management system, academic databases or university email.Universities do need AI infrastructure. But they do not need AI lock-in.That distinction is becoming urgent because universities risk treating AI procurement as though they were buying another piece of software. Generative AI is developing into something considerably more consequential: a computational layer through which students learn, academics research and professional staff increasingly perform institutional work.A procurement decision can gradually become an institutional architecture.Education’s emerging platform problemUNESCO put this problem unusually…

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