It isn’t exactly big news that big tech is in deep with the US government. Days after Trump’s inauguration last year, execs including OpenAI’s Sam Altman flocked to the Oval Office to announce a $500 billion AI infrastructure project — and they’ve remained deeply sycophantic ever since.
Now that obsequiousness could be coming back to haunt them. As reported by MIT Technology Review, activists critical of the Trump administration and the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have started a campaign called QuitGPT, urging regular users to ditch OpenAI’s chatbot for good.
So far, the campaign boasts over 700,000 supporters of the boycott. The QuitGPT website lists a few different ways to participate: quitting ChatGPT outright, cancelling paid subscriptions, and spreading the word about the boycott with others on social media.
As for why, the activists behind the boycott point to OpenAI’s incredibly tight relationship with the Trump administration. As QuitGPT notes, OpenAI president Greg Brockman famously donated $25 million to a Trump Super PAC in 2025, while ICE uses an AI tool powered by ChatGPT for recruitment.
“They’re cozying up to Trump while ICE is killing Americans and the Department of Justice is trying to take over elections,” the QuitGPT organizers write on their website. “ChatGPT enables mental-health crises through sycophancy and dependence by replacing human relationships with AI girlfriends/boyfriends. Many employees have quit OpenAI because of its leadership’s lies, deception and recklessness.”
For freelance software developer Alfred Stephen, Brockman’s donation to Trump’s political action committee was what urged him to join the boycott.
“That’s really the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Stephen told Tech Review. When he cancelled his $20 a month subscription, a customer feedback survey appeared asking what OpenAI could do to keep his business. “Don’t support the fascist regime,” he wrote.
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