Cancel ChatGPT AI boycott surges after OpenAI pentagon military deal (opens in new tab)

I canceled before this, but I definitely can’t see myself renewing chatgpt because of this and so much other shadiness.

I just don’t want them to succeed anymore, and I don’t think there’s really any world where they regain my trust.

And to be clear I don’t expect my actions do make a difference, I just would feel dirty now that they have gotten into bed with this administration. Plus I should probably assume I’d have zero privacy now too…

I'm one of the people that canceled my OpenAI Plus subscription after Sam Altman demonstrated his lack of integrity last week.

I like to think I'm doing something, but honestly I am not sure that it would make a difference if literally every consumer canceled their subscription at this point. They now have an "in" with the slush fund that we call "US military contracting", which is probably worth more than what they were going to make from all the people who canceled their accounts. Not to mention their bribes to our president, meaning that the markets can always be rigged in their favor.

I generally don’t have faith that many consumer boycotts will work, but boy is it ever easy to switch away from openAI.

Should have done it earlier [0] when no-one cared and the signs were all there.

Anyway this boycott is going to fail. Why? Because Claude was used for not only the Venezuela operation [1] but also the one in Iran [2].

Remember Anthropic never objected to military use in foreign operations, but only domestic. So if the government never made that request to Anthropic, there wouldn't be any outrage, and military use would continue with the (illegal) war in Iran still using Anthropic as a vendor.

So no different to how P̶a̶l̶a̶n̶t̶i̶r̶ Anthropic is already used in the middle east.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/17/openai-mi...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/14/us-milita...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-claude-ai-iran-war-u-...

The only thing that will save OpenAI is a miracle. The deals only prolong the pain. Just end it already. Nobody wants their products. We want affordable RAM and SSD.

What I find surprising is that I knew Altman is a horrible human being and a terrible steward of the AI revolution, yet I still got disappointed.

Unless ~800k users cancel it is still a net positive for them and that is with the current relatively small contract they have. The reality is that money is in B2B.

I regret ever having signed up. But not only because of this. Also because they just don't clearly say that they don't analyze, read or even use my prompts - it just freaks me out that some derived or "anonymized" version of my prompt is saved or even used for training other models.

Related:

How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997

OpenAI – How to delete your account

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47193478

I'm confused. Sam writes "Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement." How is this different from what Anthropic wanted?

Genuine question - what’s wrong with military leveraging modern technologies? They have been doing it for ages. And thanks to this process for example we have now internet.

Or what’s inherently wrong with catering to military customer?

What’s going on here?

Hegseth declared quite unofficially (on X) that any company that does business with the US military must cease all business interactions with Anthropic. If that actually becomes an official thing, that will be worth billions lost to Anthropic, whereas a ChatGPT boycott by a few million people (who probably weren't using it that much anyway) is mostly a drop in the bucket.

Imagine if OpenAI fails one day and sells to a company like Palantir. What would happen to all of the sensitive data that they're sitting on?

Most regular people, they don't care and will continue to use ChatGPT

ChatGPT has 900 million users now, across continents and they don't care about this DoW deal.

I cancelled all my subscriptions and quickly revoked all OpenAI API Keys

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230990

Anthropic are really suffering with the influx of new users, multiple times per day there are alerts.

Here's a reminder that before you cancel you can go to Settings -> Data Controls -> Export Data to keep your chats.

> more than 1.5 million people have taken action, either by cancelling subscriptions, sharing boycott messages on social media, or signing up via quitgpt.org

That's just silly compared to their user base and wont have any effect

i mean, if Chinese AI companies are constantly distilling the latest anthropic models, and those companies are closely tied to the CCP/PLA, aren't anthropic models already being used for military purposes?