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Quit ChatGPT: right now! Your subscription is bankrolling authoritarianism | Rutger Bregman
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
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This has been discussed on here many times. Barely anyone pays for LLMs. Only companies, corporations, and a few content creators do pay. Your common folk overwhelming majority does not.
And yet, threads have been flooded the past couple of days with users proudly declaring how they're canceling their subscriptions after funneling who knows how much money into Altman's pockets unironically and without an ounce of shame lmfao
And of those that do, I'm sure there's large corporate contracts, negotiated with OpenAI and not going anywhere. Which is why they tell you how many paid subscribers they have, not how many contracts and then individuals.
The US government subscriptions would account for maybe 1 or 2 million paid users alone, and that might not include Palantir's use of OpenAI models in their systems which then get contracted out.
This random website claims 44,780 companies reporting using ChatGPT. So entire small companies of 5-10 people might be using it, and then a thousand people at larger companies, that might get you to 10 million users right there.
This site estimates 20million subscriptions, granted this is estimated from a chatgpt comment https://www.businessofapps.com/data/chatgpt-statistics/
I mean, should we believe them? Your source did an estimation too.
Also:
Where 20mil is about 3% of paid customers which is not as huge as you'd expect. And this 700mil are the ones that are only using LLM once a week. Does not account to the ones who uses it more seldom and/or are unregistered users. If we count those, paid customer % would certainly plummet.
700mil is slightly over 2x USA population. And?
We can bend this logic a bit more. We have 8 billion people on this planet, and only Pakistan would be paying for a service that the rest of the world is using but not paying for.
We are talking about percentages here. 20mil is a lot. But 3% is not so much in the grand scheme of things.