We All Have to Quit CHATGPT Today. Here's Why and How (It Takes 8 Minutes)
If you know me, you know I’m usually the last person to say "vote with your wallet", BUT THIS IS DIFFERENT!
Yes, we should all eat less meat, buy less fast fashion and delete our Amazon accounts. We mostly agree on this and we rarely do something about it.
Here’s why quitting ChatGPT today is different.
I'm asking you to switch your AI chatbot. That's it. Uninstall one app, install another. Move your conversations over. It takes about eight minutes. And unlike most consumer boycotts, this one is already working.
OPEN AI is DOCTOR OCtopus
If you don't remember from the BEST EVER MADE ORIGINAL SAM RAIMI SPIDER-MAN SERIES, Doctor Octopus was a brilliant scientist who invented a technology that could save humanity. Right before he could do that, the literal safety switch that prevented him from becoming a serial killer broke and he became a maniac who had to be stopped by Spider-Man, with the indispensable help of the everyday people of New York.
Today, you and I are facing a multibillion-dollar company that has breached almost every safety commitment it has ever made and just signed a contract to be used for literal autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. The safety switch broke and we have to do something.
Here are six reason why I think OpenIA is real life Doctor Octopus:
They abandoned their own mission.OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit with an explicit charter: build AI that benefits all of humanity, and never develop AI that could be used to harm people. They have since converted into a for-profit entity, and their former co-founder Elon Musk is now heading to trial over fraud claims that OpenAI betrayed its founding promises when it took billions from Microsoft and restructured around profit.
They took the Pentagon deal. In late February 2026, Anthropic (the company behind Claude) publicly refused to give the Pentagon unrestricted access to its AI, with CEO Dario Amodei writing that some uses of AI are "outside the bounds of what today's technology can safely and reliably do." Within hours, Sam Altman swooped in and signed a deal to deploy OpenAI's models on classified military networks for "any lawful purpose," a phrase broad enough to include autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. OpenAI's own employee Caitlin Kalinowski resigned over it, writing that "surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got."
They failed on safety when it mattered most. Before the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in February 2026, which killed eight people including five children, OpenAI's moderation system had flagged the shooter's ChatGPT account. The messages were violent and specific enough that the account was banned. But nobody picked up the phone. Nobody called law enforcement. The flag was filed away
They are drowning in copyright lawsuits. Over 70 infringement lawsuits are now pending against AI companies in US federal courts, with OpenAI at the centre of a consolidated mega-case involving The New York Times, the Authors Guild, and dozens of other plaintiffs. A federal judge has ordered OpenAI to hand over 20 million ChatGPT conversation logs as part of discovery. A German court has already ruled that OpenAI's use of copyrighted song lyrics to train GPT-4 violates copyright law.
They are planning to put ads in ChatGPT. After building their user base on a clean, ad-free experience, OpenAI has started introducing advertisements into the platform. If they get away with it, every other AI company will follow.
Their executives are major political donors. OpenAI leadership has made significant donations to Trump, Republican causes, and Big Tech SuperPACs, using their market dominance to lobby for fast, unregulated expansion of data centres regardless of environmental or energy cost.
This boycott is already biting
Here is the part that separates this from Meatless Mondays.
ChatGPT's app market share has fallen from 69% in January 2025 to 45% by January 2026. Their web traffic share dropped from 87% to around 65% in the same period. Uninstalls of ChatGPT spiked by 295% the day after the Pentagon deal was announced. Claude shot to the number one spot on the US App Store.The QuitGPT movement claims over 1.5 million people have taken action.
OpenAI is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026. They have never turned a profit. Analysts don't expect profitability before 2029 at the earliest, and some project cumulative losses of $115 billion through that date. Engineers at OpenAI are eight times more likely to leave for Anthropic than the other way around. Most of the company's senior safety leadership has exited
This is not a company that can afford to ignore its users leaving. Your subscription cancellation is not a drop in the ocean. It is part of a wave that is already reshaping the market.
You're not even making a sacrifice
My honest opinion on why this boycott is working is because simultaneously Claude became the better product now anyway.
Claude leads in user engagement, with the highest average time spent per daily user of any AI assistant. The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey found Claude Sonnet to be the most admired LLM among developers, with a 67.5% rating, used by 43% of professional developers. Claude Code hit $1 billion in annualised revenue just six months after launch and has doubled since. Four percent of all public GitHub commits are now authored by Claude Code.
You are not downgrading. You are upgrading, and taking a moral stand where it matters.
How to switch (it took me 8 minutes)
Here’s a short video that I followed step by step and my Claude now knows everything my Chat GPT did and is much more personalized than Chat GPT ever was.
We have to Draw the LIne Today
I truly believe we are at one of those rare moments where individual consumer decisions can shape the trajectory of an entire industry. The AI companies that survive the next five years will be the ones that earned public trust. The ones that didn't will serve as warnings from the past.
OpenAI chose profit over safety, military contracts over ethical boundaries, and political influence over public accountability. They did this while losing billions of dollars a year, which means they are vulnerable to exactly the kind of pressure that consumers can apply.
If you’re reading this post it means you probably have unnecessary spare time anyways so just do it right now;). It takes minutes!
