Clemson becomes second SC university eyeing Open AI contract. Here’s how schools are using the tech.

Clemson University could become the second South Carolina college to sign a contract with ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

The Upstate school is considering a $3 million contract with the technology company, according to documents filed with the state’s fiscal oversight agency.

In June, the University of South Carolina also inked a $1.5 million deal with OpenAI to offer free artificial intelligence tools to all students and faculty beginning this fall. USC’s satellite campuses around the state also had the option to join.

So far, more than 14,000 people on the USC Columbia campus have signed up for the free service, according to Brice Bible, the schools IT chief. USC Upstate is approaching 1,200 users.

In all, USC has about 40,000 students enrolled at its Columbia campus and more than 8,000 employees, including about 1,780 full time teaching faculty.

“There are a lot of companies out there that have tools emerging,” Bible said. “With this we get to be at the ground floor, helping to analyze those tools and find the best way that it works for a university … We’re at the front edge of this, and we’re getting a chance to be a part of creating it as much as using it.”

The paid version of ChatGPT, which USC students and employees can access for free, usually costs $20 per month.
The technology has limits on the number of questions or prompts a user can input per hour, Bible said. With the paid version, USC and Clemson students and staff will be allowed a higher number of uses before bumping up against the limit.

The education version also allows users to upload large amounts of data that the tool can help analyze. And written into the contract are clauses that OpenAI can’t use any of the universities’ data to train or strengthen its AI capabilities, protecting professors’ and researchers’ intellectual property, USC spokesman Jeff Stensland said.

“Think about graduating today with a great degree from USC, and you’ve got knowledge and working experience on how to use a variety of AI tools and how to use them in your business,” Bible said. “You were already marketable with your USC degree, but now you add that skill set to it.”

How USC is using ChatGPT

USC faculty are reporting using the technology a number of ways.

The student center has customized it to act as a digital tutor, known as Cocky Scholar, on a number of subjects for when students can’t make it in to the center for help, Bible said.

“At three in the morning, I have questions. I can ask this those questions and and it’s almost as good as having the (expert) person live in the chat,” he said.

Real estate and finance professor Ozgur Ince has used ChatGPT to stage mock economic debates in the classroom, asking the technology to generate opposing viewpoints on complex financial principles and argue them back and forth for the students, according to the USC Provost’s Office

A German professor, Lara Ducate, and Nina Moreno, a Spanish professor, have used the technology to create robots that can mimic native speakers, allowing students to rehearse conversations, practicing grammar and vocabulary in real time, before they encounter real life native speakers.

And Juan Caicedo, a civil and environmental engineering professor, customized his ChatGPT so students can ask it a question and the robot will guide the students through the mathematical equations they might use to come up with an answer without giving the direct answers on how to solve the problem.

“We’re not telling faculty what to think, but what to think about,” said Lara Lomicka Anderson, the school’s dean of undergraduate studies. “So we’re really encouraging the use of AI as a tool, thinking about how it can help students to brainstorm, to summarize, to serve as an assistant or as a tutor, which can really help promote some of that more critical thinking and higher level thinking that we want all of our students to be developing as they are here with us at the university.”

Lomicka Anderson also said a faculty panel has developed university-wide guidelines for the technology’s use, including the suggestion that professors include a policy for their classrooms.

“Because if you’re not putting any guidelines out there, it’s free game for whatever the students decide to do,” she said.
Bible also foresees USC using the technology for university operations.

For example, USC’s many science labs have large cylinders that store gas needed to run Bunsen burners and other lab tools. A researcher could use ChatGPT to set up a process that would reorder gas automatically when the supply is running low, taking one less task off the researcher’s to-do list.

Clemson considering contract

At Clemson, the school is “investing in deeper, custom AI capabilities that go beyond what other universities have purchased, positioning the campus to lead in teaching, operations, and research innovation,” according to a filing with the state’s procurement office. Those added tools are why Clemson would have to pay twice what the technology company is charging USC, according to college spokesman Joe Galbraith.

If a deal is signed, the technology would be available to the college’s 37,000 students and employees.

As for why ChatGPT and not another technology, such as Microsoft Copilot or Google Gemini, Clemson said the service is the most widely used and offers a larger suite of tools at the scale the school needs.

Clemson pointed to a recent survey on AI usage by Elon University in North Carolina that showed, of those that have used the technology, 72% have used ChatGPT, while 50% have used Google’s Gemini, 39% have used Microsoft’s Copilot, 20% have used Meta’s LLaMa, 12% have used xAI’s Grok, 9% have used Anthropic’s Claude.

“This puts ChatGPT as the far leader in the field and we would assume would reflect similar usage here at Clemson,” according to a statement from Clemson.

ChatGPT in education

OpenAI has been on an education-related expansion spree, signing various deals with more than a dozen colleges across the globe.
Arizona State University, California State University and Oxford University all have so-called ChatGPT Edu accounts. And OpenAI also invested $50 million in a partnership, which it calls the NextGenAI consortium, to help speed up the research process. California State and Oxford are part of that group, as are:

So we’re in good company,” Bible told members of USC’s governing board at its September meeting.

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By: Jessica Holdman – October 7, 2025 10:29 am
Reprinted from The South Carolina Gazette