Greg Brockman donated $25 million to Trump and said it was for humanity's benefit. Here's what that looks like in practice, and why 700,000 people are canceling ChatGPT.
Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, donated $25 million to Donald Trump's political efforts and said he did it for humanity's benefit. That framing deserves scrutiny, because the actual record is right there in the open.
OpenAI just won a $200 million Pentagon contract. Trump's defense secretary Pete Hegseth wants to use AI to develop lethal drone swarms and to surveil American citizens. ICE, the agency whose officers killed two Americans in Minneapolis, runs a screening tool powered by ChatGPT. The man who says his donation benefits humanity is now one of the largest financial backers of these programs. He was also betting that you'd never connect those dots. That you'd keep paying, keep scrolling, and do nothing.
Over the last few weeks, 700,000 people have started proving him wrong.
OpenAI is our bus company right now.
A campaign calling on people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions has exploded. People from across the world are signing the pledge, canceling their accounts, and sharing it widely. Mark Ruffalo has joined. Dozens of media outlets are covering it. It keeps growing because people are sensing something that I think is exactly right: this is a winnable fight.
As a historian, I've studied the major consumer boycotts of history. The ones that actually worked all shared one characteristic. They didn't try to fight everything at once. They picked a single target, one that was both symbolically powerful and genuinely vulnerable, and then went all in.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, was not a protest against all of American segregation. It was about one bus company in one city. A year later, it had broken the back of segregated transit and sent a message that echoed across the entire country. Focused pressure applied to the right point changes the whole system.
"They didn't try to fight everything at once. They picked a single target — a target that was both symbolically powerful and generally vulnerable. And then they went all in."
OpenAI is the right target, and the timing matters. Their market share has already collapsed from 69% to 45% in a single year. They're on track to lose $14 billion this year. They're so desperate for revenue that they've started running ads, something their own CEO once called a last resort. Investors are watching their subscriber numbers closely. Every cancellation registers.
Their market share collapsed from 69% to 45% in one year, and they're on track to lose $14 billion.
Switching costs are close to zero. It takes about 10 seconds to move to an alternative like Claude or Mistral, and in many cases those alternatives are just as good, or better. There is no meaningful price you pay to leave.
Greg Brockman put $25 million on the bet that you wouldn't care, that you'd keep paying, that you'd do nothing. Cancel your subscription. Let's prove him wrong.
