• by Sarah Mahoney , Staff Writer, March 5, 2026

The #QuitGPT movement has gained real momentum over the past week, vaulting to new levels after an ugly public feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon raised enormous questions about the role tech companies should play in government.

The numbers are striking: #QuitGPT's website says it has already inspired 2.5 million consumers to take some action, with 1.5 million canceling paid subscriptions. And competitor Anthropic's app soared to No. 1 in the Apple App Store, CNBC reports, up from No. 131 at the end of January.

Consumer boycotts don't often work, even when people understand what they're buying and have somewhere else to go. With AI, neither condition is met — at least not by the majority of consumers. I was one of the 1.5 million who canceled anyway.

For the uninitiated: organizers started #QuitGPT partially in response to donations made by OpenAI president Greg Brockman to President Donald Trump's super PAC MAGA Inc. Brockman told Wired he did so in support of the larger industry, and that he is on "Team Humanity." The movement also pointed out that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses a résumé screening tool powered by ChatGPT-4.

Marketing expert Scott Galloway and tech journalist Kara Swisher amplified the effort through their aggressive "Resist and Unsubscribe" campaign, targeting tech companies working most closely with ICE.

Celebrity influencers, including actors Mark Ruffalo and Chelsea Handler, are adding plenty of earned media.

The goal is ambitious, and I'm fully on board with the spirit of it. "We're asking people to join an economic strike targeting Big Tech and companies enabling ICE," Galloway writes in a recent newsletter. "If we succeed in turning even a small number of them into unsubscribers, that could translate into a sizable decline in subscription growth — mother's milk to the tech companies — and market value. Only then will CEOs who've enabled the president push back … or at least get off their knees."

But Galloway's full list of tech offenders would require most U.S. consumers — and certainly me — to make massive changes in behavior. No more Meta, Amazon, Apple or Google? Lucy Atkinson, a professor in the School of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Texas at Austin, told NPR she has doubts about "Resist and Unsubscribe" for exactly this reason. Asking people to opt out of Big Tech is a significant demand, "because Big Tech is baked into so many of our day-to-day activities." And boycotts do best when consumers have alternatives to pivot to.

For me, that pivot was straightforward: dump ChatGPT, sign up for Anthropic's Claude, an LLM I had already used on a free basis. Did I strike a blow for democracy? Who knows. Even after Anthropic's feud with the Department of Defense exploded on social media — with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk — CEO Dario Amodei is reportedly back at the negotiating table, according to the Financial Times.  

I'm not kidding myself that canceling a $20 subscription will hurt OpenAI, which reportedly generated $13.1 billion in revenue last year, with $280 billion projected by 2030. I have to be content with thinking it's at least a soupçon of pain, and part of a PR problem. It's like writing a cranky letter to the CEO. Will he listen, or continue to chase Pentagon money at the expense of the principles I thought these companies stood for? Almost certainly not. But it still feels good to send that tiny message.