OpenAI’s DoW announcement triggers “cancel ChatGPT” calls on social media

Posts calling for ChatGPT cancellations are flooding Reddit and X after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a deal with the US Department of War to deploy the company’s AI models on classified military networks.

The news broke late Friday when Altman posted on X that OpenAI had “reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network,” adding that the DoW showed “a deep respect for safety” throughout talks. As expected, a lot of users weren’t buying it.

The timing makes it harder to take that statement at face value. Earlier the same day, the Trump administration banned Anthropic from all US government work, with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth calling the AI startup a “supply chain risk.” Anthropic had refused to sign a Pentagon contract without guarantees that its models wouldn’t be used for mass surveillance of US citizens or fully autonomous weapons. The government cut them off. OpenAI signed a deal hours later.

On Reddit, two threads are driving most of the backlash. A thread titled, “You’re now training a war machine. Let’s see proof of cancellation,” is packed with cancellation screenshots, with some of them pointing out the irony: Altman publicly voiced support for Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei that same morning, then dropped the DoW announcement hours later.

Another thread, “Cancel and Delete ChatGPT!!!”, has crossed 1,700 upvotes, with users also pushing negative App Store and Play Store reviews. Many say they are switching to Claude, with one user writing: “I respect a company that stands by its morals. Anthropic has earned my business.”

On X, replies to Altman’s post are running heavily negative. “Those who do not wish to fund Skynet should cancel their ChatGPT accounts” is one of the more pointed reactions making the rounds.

The DoW side is also pushing back hard on the idea that this is simply OpenAI stepping in after Anthropic said no. Senior official Jeremy Lewin wrote on X that the difference is how the guardrails are written. He claimed OpenAI’s contract anchors limits to existing legal and policy authorities, not a company’s own terms of service.

In his view, letting a private firm define “normative” limits for military AI gives too much control to a CEO, and the government is not going to accept that for sensitive systems. Lewin also said this same compromise was offered to Anthropic and rejected.

It’s not the first time OpenAI has drawn this kind of scrutiny. We reported earlier this month that OpenAI quietly removed the word “safely” from its mission statement in a recent IRS Form 990 filing. With this DoW deal, it now looks like confirmation of what that change suggested.

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.