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 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 canceled my sub a while back and figured hey - worst case, I saved some money (since I subscribe to multiple AI services). Regardless, casting your one vote with your money is important.
I mean, look at all the reputational damage that has happened with Microsoft and Google throughout the years; it's so common that it's basically ignored now.
I'm glad I was able to export all my data, but they made me wait 24 hours nearly-on-the-dot to get it.
Wonder how many folks didn't bother waiting.
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-...
How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997
OpenAI – How to delete your account
Important distinction as there are now no laws against autonomous weapons and surveillance has been widespread and unhindered by judicial oversight for quite a while now.
Or what’s inherently wrong with catering to military customer?
What’s going on here?
What is wrong, however, is that the retaliatory move to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk is not ok. Further, the timing of it all stinks.
Everyone smells a rat, not just me. Ever heard of “ask the audience”? The crowd is right a HUGE majority of the time.
Even if that's the case, how do you know it's right this particular time?
Also, one can say, crowd huge majority of time makes mediocre decisions at best. Or: crowd can be easily manipulated with intentional propaganda.
We can do all sorts of generalizations that would be generally true. But I got your point, thank you.
ChatGPT has 900 million users now, across continents and they don't care about this DoW deal.
That's just silly compared to their user base and wont have any effect
It seems that government wanted to use Claude for mass analysis of commercially obtained data on American people and Anthropic wouldn't let them (source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/03/inside-anthro... ).
DoD kept asking for changes of contract where at least the legalese would be changed to somewhat more permissive but Anthropic stayed their ground.
Sam Altman probably let them do that, while using language like "we have technical means of oversight and the same red lines as Anthropic". But in reality they will allow DoD to do what Anthropic didn't.
See this for more information: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBrggrw4mhgbksoYY/a-tale-of-...