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As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly shapes society (Örtegren, 2024), education systems both in the Nordics and globally face the challenge of preparing students for socio-technical change, including AI-related digital competence with knowledge, skills, and democratic values. The challenge of preparing students for such changes play out in the field of digital education, where various actors (e.g., think tanks, media, researchers, teacher unions, commercial actors) engage in knowledge production and policy construction (Rensfeldt & Player-Koro, 2020). Such policy processes include curriculum change, where some countries have embedded AI-related digital competence within existing subjects, while others have created separate AI school subjects (UNESCO, 2022). 

The aim of this paper is to examine the integration of AI into the Swedish upper secondary school as a separate school subject, particularly how policy ideas about AI education are shaped and legitimized within the context of Nordic education. The theoretical framework used for analysis draws on new institutionalism, with attention to how ideas, institutions, and policy actors interact in educational change processes. The analyzed data include policy texts and interviews with key policy-process participants. 

The early results indicate how AI as a separate school subject is shaped by ideas embedded within discourses about future readiness and educational responsiveness to societal change. The influence of ideas seemingly stem from policy-process participants’ positions within the policy process combined with their networks outside the forum for official AI school subject policymaking. Ultimately, the ideas create tensions between democratic citizenship and social equity on the one hand, and labor market demands and global competitiveness on the other. These tensions reflect broader challenges in Nordic education systems as they adapt to technological change while committed to democratic values and social justice. The tentative results point to how AI education in the Nordic context can become a political project (cf. Selwyn, 2022), characterized by competing values and technical-instrumentalist perspectives that shape institutional structures and educational goals.