For Stephen, who was already tinkering with other chatbots, learning about Brockman’s donation was the last straw. “That’s really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he says. When they canceled their ChatGPT subscription, a survey came out asking what OpenAI could have done to keep their subscription. “Do not support the fascist regime,” he wrote.
QuitGPT is one of the latest measures in a growing movement by activists and disaffected users to cancel their membership. Over the past few weeks, stories of users abandoning chatbots have flooded Reddit. Many lamented the performance of the latest model, GPT-5.2. Others shared memes mimicking the chatbot’s cuteness. Some people made plans”mass cancellation partyIn San Francisco, a sarcastic gesture GPT-4o Funeral It was released by an OpenAI employee to poke fun at users mourning the model’s impending retirement. Still, others are opposed to what they see as a deepening entanglement between OpenAI and the Trump administration.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
By December 2025, According to ChatGPT there were approximately 900 million weekly active users. Information. While it’s unclear how many users have joined the boycott, QuitGPT is paying attention. a fresh instagram post The campaign received over 36 million views and over 1.3 million likes. And organizers say more than 17,000 people have signed up to the campaign’s website, which asks people if they canceled their subscription, would they commit to stopping using ChatGPT, or would share the campaign on social media.
“There are plenty of examples of unsuccessful campaigns like this, but we’ve seen a lot of effectiveness,” says Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University. She says a wave of canceled subscriptions rarely affects a company’s behavior unless it reaches critical levels. “The place where there is a pressure point that could work is where consumer behavior happens if enough people actually use their money to express their political views.”
MIT Technology Review reached three OpenAI employees, none of whom said they were familiar with the campaign.
Dozens of left-leaning teens and twentysomethings from across America came together in late January to organize QuitGPT. They range from pro-democracy activists and climate organizers to technocrats and self-proclaimed cyber libertarians, many of them experienced grassroots campaigners. they were inspired by a viral video Posted by Scott Galloway, marketing professor and host at New York University professor g pod. He argued that the best way to stop ICE was to persuade people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. A breach in OpenAI’s customer base could send the stock market into turmoil and threaten an economic recession, which would unsettle Trump, he said.
