For Stephen, who had already been tinkering with other chatbots, learning about Brockman’s donation was the ultimate straw. “That’s really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he says. When he canceled his ChatGPT subscription, a survey popped up asking what OpenAI could have done to maintain his subscription. “Don’t support the fascist regime,” he wrote.
QuitGPT is certainly one of the most recent salvos in a growing movement by activists and disaffected users to cancel their subscriptions. In only the past few weeks, users have flooded Reddit with stories about quitting the chatbot. Many lamented the performance of GPT-5.2, the most recent model. Others shared memes parodying the chatbot’s sycophancy. Some planned a “Mass Cancellation Party” in San Francisco, a sardonic nod to the GPT-4o funeral that an OpenAI worker had floated, poking fun at users who’re mourning the model’s impending retirement. Still, others are protesting against what they see as a deepening entanglement between OpenAI and the Trump administration.
OpenAI didn’t reply to a request for comment.
As of December 2025, ChatGPT had nearly 900 million weekly energetic users, in accordance with . While it’s unclear what number of users have joined the boycott, QuitGPT is getting attention. A recent Instagram post from the campaign has greater than 36 million views and 1.3 million likes. And the organizers say that greater than 17,000 people have signed up on the campaign’s website, which asks people whether or not they canceled their subscriptions, will commit to stop using ChatGPT, or will share the campaign on social media.
“There are a number of examples of failed campaigns like this, but we’ve seen a number of effectiveness,” says Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University. A wave of canceled subscriptions rarely sways an organization’s behavior, unless it reaches a critical mass, she says. “The place where there’s a pressure point that may work is where the patron behavior is that if enough people actually use their … money to specific their political beliefs.”
reached out to 3 employees at OpenAI, none of whom said they were conversant in the campaign.
Dozens of left-leaning teens and twentysomethings scattered across the US got here together to prepare QuitGPT in late January. They vary from pro-democracy activists and climate organizers to techies and self-proclaimed cyber libertarians, lots of them seasoned grassroots campaigners. They were inspired by a viral video posted by Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at Latest York University and host of . He argued that the very best technique to stop ICE was to influence people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. Denting OpenAI’s subscriber base could ripple through the stock market and threaten an economic downturn that might nudge Trump, he said.
