heyPenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is on track loss of 14 billion dollars This year. Its market share is falling, and its own CEO, Sam Altman, has admitted it “tied up“One element of the product. It takes 10 seconds of your time to accelerate that degradation.
Boycott was called at the grassroots level quit gpt It is spreading across the US and beyond, with people being asked to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. More than one million people have answered the call. mark ruffalo And katy perry Have put all our efforts behind this. This is one of the most significant consumer boycotts in recent memory, and I believe it is time for Europeans to get involved.
Here’s what triggered it. Earlier this year, this news came out OpenAI President Greg Brockman donates $25 million to Maga Inc.Donald Trump’s biggest super pack. This made him Trump’s biggest donor in the last cycle. when wired asked them to explainBrockman said his donation was in service of OpenAI’s mission for the benefit of “humanity”.
Let me tell you what that mission looks like in practice. Employees of ICE — the agency whose agents killed two people in Minneapolis in January — have used a screening tool Powered by Chatgpt. The same company behind your friendly chatbot is helping the government decide who to appoint for deportation raids.
And it is not stopping here. OpenAI helped launch $125 million lobbying initiative, a super pacTo ensure that no state can regulate AI. It is attacking any politician who tries to pass security laws. He wants Trump, and only Trump, to write the rules for the most powerful technology on Earth. Every month, subscription money from users around the world goes to a company that is embedding itself in the Trump administration’s repressive infrastructure. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a business strategy.
The situation became even worse last week. When the Trump administration demanded that AI companies give the Pentagon unrestricted access to their technology — including mass surveillance and autonomous weapons — Anthropic, the company behind ChatGate’s main rival, the cloud, refuse.
The response was swift and extraordinary. Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Anthropic’s technology. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced The company is a “supply-chain risk to national security,” a designation typically reserved for Chinese companies like Huawei. He announced that anyone who did business with the US military would be barred from working with Anthropic. It’s essentially a corporate death sentence for the crime of refusing to help build killer robots.
And what did OpenAI do? That same Friday night, when his rival Sam Altman was taking a principled stand signed quietly An agreement with the Pentagon to replace Anthropic.
I want to be clear: I am not anti-AI. I use AI tools in my work every day. This is not about rejecting technology. It’s about rejecting the idea that we have no choice but to fund a company that is promoting totalitarianism.
Now, as a historian, what excites me is this moment. The most effective consumer boycotts in history have two qualities: they are narrow and they are easy. QuietGPT fits this pattern perfectly.
First, let’s talk about the importance of targeting your efforts. In 1955, black residents of Montgomery, Alabama did not try to end the entire system of segregation with one stroke. They chose a target – the city bus system – and for 381 daysThey left and went to work. It broke the bus company financially and it broke the back of individual transit throughout the American South.
OpenAI is our bus company. It’s the perfect target because it’s incredibly vulnerable. it is jealous of money At one of the fastest rates in corporate history. Its market share has declined From 69% to 45% in a single year. It’s so desperate for revenue that it’s started running ads, something Altman It was once called “the last resort.”Investors are watching its customer base like hawks. Registers every cancellation.
And there’s another thing that makes QuitGPT different from periodic calls to #DeleteFacebook or boycott Amazon — campaigns that failed because the demand was too great. Leaving Facebook meant losing your social graph, your family photos, your community groups. And for many Americans, leaving the Amazon is like giving up oxygen. Friction defeated the theory.
In contrast, canceling ChatGPT is an easy task. You can do it in 10 seconds, and the alternatives are just as good or even better. History shows why #QuitGPT has so much potential: effective campaigns like 1977 Nestlé boycott and this 2023 Bud Light boycott were successful because they were narrow and simple. They had a clear goal and people had a lot of good options.
The great boycotts in history did not succeed because millions of people suddenly became heroic workers. They succeeded because buying a different brand of coffee, or choosing a different beer, was something anyone could do on a Tuesday afternoon. A small act repeated on a large scale becomes a political earthquake.
Go to skipgpt.org. Cancel your subscription. Using the free version? Delete the app, as your conversations still feed the machine. Then try an alternative and tell at least one person why.
The president of OpenAI bet $25 million that you wouldn’t care where your money was going, and even if you did, you wouldn’t care enough to spend 10 seconds switching to something else. Time to prove him wrong.
