The two-year loop of AI cheating coverage — students violate, schools scramble, detection fails, repeat — has broken. Not because the underlying behavior stopped, but because the writers covering it stopped treating enforcement as the story. Slate, Bloomberg, New York Magazine, The Bulwark, and The Free Press each published pieces this spring that positioned student AI use as a symptom worth diagnosing rather than a rule worth enforcing . The cumulative effect is that the frame has shifted: the question is no longer whether students are cheating with AI but…