{"id":17840,"date":"2026-02-10T17:24:44","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T17:24:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/10\/a-quitgpt-campaign-is-urging-people-to-cancel-chatgpt-subscriptions\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T17:24:44","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T17:24:44","slug":"a-quitgpt-campaign-is-urging-people-to-cancel-chatgpt-subscriptions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/10\/a-quitgpt-campaign-is-urging-people-to-cancel-chatgpt-subscriptions\/","title":{"rendered":"A \u201cQuitGPT\u201d campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot\u2019s coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies. Then he came across a post on Reddit about a campaign called QuitGPT<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The campaign urged ChatGPT users to cancel their subscriptions, flagging a substantial contribution by OpenAI president Greg Brockman to President Donald Trump\u2019s super PAC MAGA Inc. It also pointed out that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, uses a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 screening tool powered by ChatGPT-4. The federal agency has become a political flashpoint since its agents fatally shot two people in Minneapolis in January.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Stephen, who had already been tinkering with other chatbots, learning about Brockman\u2019s donation was the final straw. \u201cThat\u2019s really the straw that broke the camel\u2019s back,\u201d he says. When he canceled his ChatGPT subscription, a survey popped up asking what OpenAI could have done to keep his subscription. \u201cDon\u2019t support the fascist regime,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

QuitGPT is one of the latest salvos in a growing movement by activists and disaffected users to cancel their subscriptions. In just the past few weeks, users have flooded Reddit with stories about quitting the chatbot. Many lamented the performance of GPT-5.2, the latest model. Others shared memes parodying the chatbot\u2019s sycophancy. Some planned a \u201cMass Cancellation Party<\/a>\u201d in San Francisco, a sardonic nod to the GPT-4o funeral<\/a> that an OpenAI employee had floated, poking fun at users who are mourning the model\u2019s impending retirement. Still, others are protesting against what they see as a deepening entanglement between OpenAI and the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

As of December 2025, <\/strong>ChatGPT had nearly 900 million weekly active users, according to The Information<\/em><\/a>. While it\u2019s unclear how many users have joined the boycott, QuitGPT is getting attention. A recent Instagram post<\/a> from the campaign has more than 36 million views and 1.3 million likes. And the organizers say that more than 17,000 people have signed up on the campaign\u2019s website, which asks people whether they canceled their subscriptions, will commit to stop using ChatGPT, or will share the campaign on social media.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are lots of examples of failed campaigns like this, but we have seen a lot of effectiveness,\u201d says Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University. A wave of canceled subscriptions rarely sways a company\u2019s behavior, unless it reaches a critical mass, she says. \u201cThe place where there\u2019s a pressure point that might work is where the consumer behavior is if enough people actually use their \u2026 money to express their political opinions.\u201d<\/p>\n

MIT Technology Review <\/em>reached out to three <\/strong>employees at OpenAI, none of whom said they were familiar with the campaign.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Dozens of left-leaning teens and twentysomethings scattered across the US came together to organize QuitGPT in late January. They range from pro-democracy activists and climate organizers to techies and self-proclaimed cyber libertarians, many of them seasoned grassroots campaigners. They were inspired by a viral video<\/a> posted by Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University and host of The Prof G Pod<\/em>. He argued that the best way to stop ICE was to persuade people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. Denting OpenAI\u2019s subscriber base could ripple through the stock market and threaten an economic downturn that would nudge Trump, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe make a big enough stink for OpenAI that all of the companies in the whole AI industry have to think about whether they\u2019re going to get away enabling Trump and ICE and authoritarianism,\u201d says an organizer of QuitGPT who requested anonymity because he feared retaliation by OpenAI, citing the company\u2019s recent subpoenas<\/a> against advocates at nonprofits. OpenAI made for an obvious first target of the movement, he says, but \u201cthis is about so much more than just OpenAI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simon Rosenblum-Larson, a labor organizer in Madison, Wisconsin, who organizes movements to regulate the development of data centers, joined the campaign after hearing about it through Signal chats among community activists. \u201cThe goal here is to pull away the support pillars of the Trump administration. They\u2019re reliant on many of these tech billionaires for support and for resources,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

QuitGPT\u2019s website points to new campaign finance reports<\/a> showing that Greg Brockman and his wife each donated $12.5 million to MAGA Inc., making up nearly a quarter of the roughly $102 million it raised over the second half of 2025. The information that ICE uses a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 screening tool powered by ChatGPT-4 came from an AI inventory<\/a> published by the Department of Homeland Security in January.<\/p>\n

QuitGPT is in the mold of Galloway\u2019s own recently launched campaign, Resist and Unsubscribe<\/a>. The movement urges consumers to cancel their subscriptions to Big Tech platforms, including ChatGPT, for the month of February, as a protest to companies \u201cdriving the markets and enabling our president.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people are feeling real anxiety,\u201d Galloway told MIT Technology Review<\/em>. \u201cYou take enabling a president, proximity to the president, and an unease around AI,\u201d he says, \u201cand now people are starting to take action with their wallets.\u201d Galloway says his campaign\u2019s website can draw more than 200,000 unique visits in a day and that he receives dozens of DMs every hour showing screenshots of canceled subscriptions.<\/p>\n

The consumer boycotts follow a growing wave of pressure from inside the companies themselves. In recent weeks, tech workers have been urging their employers<\/a> to use their political clout to demand that ICE leave US cities, cancel company contracts with the agency, and speak out against the agency\u2019s actions. CEOs have started responding. OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman wrote in an internal Slack message<\/a> to employees that ICE is \u201cgoing too far.\u201d Apple CEO Tim Cook called for a \u201cdeescalation\u201d in an internal memo<\/a> posted on the company\u2019s website for employees. It was a departure from how Big Tech CEOs have courted President Trump with dinners<\/a> and donations<\/a> since his inauguration.<\/p>\n

Although spurred by a fatal immigration crackdown, these developments signal that a sprawling anti-AI movement is gaining momentum. The campaigns are tapping into simmering anxieties about AI, says Rosenblum-Larson, including the energy costs of data centers, the plague of deepfake porn, the teen mental-health crisis, the job apocalypse, and slop. \u201cIt\u2019s a really strange set of coalitions built around the AI movement,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose are the right conditions for a movement to spring up,\u201d says David Karpf, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. Brockman\u2019s donation to Trump\u2019s super PAC caught many users off guard, he says. \u201cIn the longer arc, we are going to see users respond and react to Big Tech, deciding that they\u2019re not okay with this.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}