For Stephen, who had already been tinkering with different chatbots, studying about Brockman’s donation was the ultimate straw. “That’s actually the straw that broke the camel’s again,” he says. When he canceled his ChatGPT subscription, a survey popped up asking what OpenAI might have carried out to maintain his subscription. “Don’t help the fascist regime,” he wrote.
QuitGPT is without doubt one of the newest salvos in a rising motion by activists and disaffected customers to cancel their subscriptions. In simply the previous few weeks, customers have flooded Reddit with tales about quitting the chatbot. Many lamented the efficiency of GPT-5.2, the newest mannequin. Others shared memes parodying the chatbot’s sycophancy. Some deliberate a “Mass Cancellation Occasion” in San Francisco, a sardonic nod to the GPT-4o funeral that an OpenAI worker had floated, poking enjoyable at customers who’re mourning the mannequin’s impending retirement. Nonetheless, others are protesting in opposition to what they see as a deepening entanglement between OpenAI and the Trump administration.
OpenAI didn’t reply to a request for remark.
As of December 2025, ChatGPT had almost 900 million weekly energetic customers, in keeping with The Info. Whereas it’s unclear what number of customers have joined the boycott, QuitGPT is getting consideration. A current Instagram put up from the marketing campaign has greater than 36 million views and 1.3 million likes. And the organizers say that greater than 17,000 folks have signed up on the marketing campaign’s web site, which asks folks whether or not they canceled their subscriptions, will decide to cease utilizing ChatGPT, or will share the marketing campaign on social media.
“There are many examples of failed campaigns like this, however we now have seen loads of effectiveness,” says Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American College. A wave of canceled subscriptions not often sways an organization’s habits, until it reaches a crucial mass, she says. “The place the place there’s a stress level which may work is the place the patron habits is that if sufficient folks really use their … cash to specific their political beliefs.”
MIT Know-how Evaluation reached out to a few workers at OpenAI, none of whom mentioned they had been conversant in the marketing campaign.
Dozens of left-leaning teenagers and twentysomethings scattered throughout the US got here collectively to arrange QuitGPT in late January. They vary from pro-democracy activists and local weather organizers to techies and self-proclaimed cyber libertarians, lots of them seasoned grassroots campaigners. They had been impressed by a viral video posted by Scott Galloway, a advertising and marketing professor at New York College and host of The Prof G Pod. He argued that the easiest way to cease ICE was to influence folks to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. Denting OpenAI’s subscriber base might ripple via the inventory market and threaten an financial downturn that may nudge Trump, he mentioned.
