For Stephen, who had already been tinkering with other chatbots, learning about Brockman’s donation was the final 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 keep his subscription. “Don’t support the fascist regime,” he wrote.
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’s sycophancy. Some planned a “Mass Cancellation Party” in San Francisco, a sardonic nod to the GPT-4o funeral that an OpenAI employee had floated, poking fun at users who are 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 did not respond to a request for comment.
As of December 2025, ChatGPT had nearly 900 million weekly active users, according to The Information. While it’s unclear how many users have joined the boycott, QuitGPT is getting attention. A recent Instagram post 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’s website, which asks people whether they canceled their subscriptions, will commit to stop using ChatGPT, or will share the campaign on social media.
“There are lots of examples of failed campaigns like this, but we have seen a lot of effectiveness,” says Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University. A wave of canceled subscriptions rarely sways a company’s behavior, unless it reaches a critical mass, she says. “The place where there’s a pressure point that might work is where the consumer behavior is if enough people actually use their … money to express their political opinions.”
MIT Technology Review reached out to three employees at OpenAI, none of whom said they were familiar with the campaign.
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 posted by Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University and host of The Prof G Pod. He argued that the best way to stop ICE was to persuade people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. Denting OpenAI’s subscriber base could ripple through the stock market and threaten an economic downturn that would nudge Trump, he said.
