As the UN’s specialised agency for education and custodian of the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (2021), UNESCO has released a number of policy documents on AI in education (AIEd). What wider social and institutional forces, logics and ideologies underpin the discursive representation of AIEd in these documents? What role does UNESCO play in legitimating—or contesting—the alignment of governments’ and BigTech’s political and economic interests? Combining discourse analysis of UNESCO’s AIEd policy guidance documents and social network analysis of authors cited in these documents, we explore the power, people, and processes impacting policy text production. Combining interpretative, relational and visual representation methods, we depict the connectivity and knowledge exchange among scholars, governments, private companies and other organizations, suggesting that UNESCO privileges particular cultural, socio-political and economic ideologies with potentially serious implications for the future of education as a common, collective good.