OpenAI – How to delete your account

Just boycott them all if you can. That's what I've done.

Some people's livelihoods probably depends on Claude and they can't say use Glm4.7 on HF. Fine. But it's a moral compromise, that's life sometimes you need to compromise what you want for what you need. just don't tell yourself it's a reasonable line to hold.

I can't decouple from Google unfortunately but I accept that without fooling myself into thinking "Oh but Google are fine".

Actually Google Gemini provides almost no control on the data you share. Same for Antigravity. No "opt-out" button, even as a lie. Even when you are a paying user. Only Google Workplace users have some control.

There is a setting in Gemini but it removes all your chat history. For Antigravity, I think there is nothing preventing them from use your code and data your agents upload in the background unless you are a workspace user.

Note: Canceled my ChatGPT subscription and deleted an account.

The reason this is on the front page now is because of Altmans recent deal with the department of war, not because of these general grievances.

maybe they will have a human in the loop when vibe bombing the world, if the person agrees not to use an ad blocker

I know we should boycott openAI, i was just wondering if I should also boycott altman's other venture, Worldcoin which is down 97.27%? He said I'll get UBI soon

  > ads would be the last resort

Don’t you think Grok / X.ai is worse?

I think this misses the main reason. I mean ads have been a thing for a while now. What's new is:

* Brockman donates $25m to a pro Trump super PAC

* Altman is in talks with talks with the Pentagon since Wednesday

* Now it's announced Anthropic is dropped by the military, designated a supply chain risk, and OpenAI takes over its military contract, after Anthropic objected to surveilling US citizens and allowing autonomous kill bots.

The thing stinks rather.

> also, he warned that "ads would be the last resort" for LLM companies.

What is wrong with ads? I personally dislike them and prefer to just pay for services, but it seems that majority of people prefer "free"-ad-supported model.

I generally agree with your take but the juvenile name-calling really weakens the point.

Well I guess the marketing guy brought the world the ChatGPT moment then the actual scientists copied him?

Why boycott? Just use their free services and never pay for it. Cost them money instead of pay them money is a step further than boycott.

Don't forget the UBI/open-source BS he sold like a snakes-oil salesman and people even bought it.

I distrust OpenAI as much as the next guy, but “Scam Altman” has “70-year-old uncle Facebook rant” energy.

Your point stands just fine without the silly, uniquely-US-politics-style “SCAM Altman ha ha!” BS. I can feel myself getting dumber every time I am subject to one of these.

Why not go a step further and be boycotting all of them, especially those that have government contracts.

This is why I haven't used OpenAI since early 2023-ish, and when I did I signed up with a masked email (though notably I'm sure they can tie my chats to me via my credit card :) ). afaict Sam Altman is essentially a sociopath, like lots of the "ruling elite" these days. And while I still use Gemini and Claude extensively and recognize some of the irony there, I view not using OpenAI as harm reduction to myself.

Is Scam Altman the modern equivalent of Micro$oft?

I mean marketing is how business uses psychology to control the masses.. why would we think ai wouldn’t be used by businesses, governments, independent psychopaths?

OpenAI just advertises that they’ll make you pay later and raises $100B+ on having “900M+ users”

I deleted all my free accounts (turns out I have a few...)

Learnt from GOOG that nothing is free. I'm now paying for Claude

Ads are imminent, TOS just changed to allow them, and free users will get trash models that are net positive profitable after ads. Better to just leave now.

I think what anthropic did yesterday was good, but I had to take a step back and think, well it wasn’t a bridge too far for them to allow claude to be used in the wildly illegal maduro kidnapping operation.

I wonder why that is...

it was like that when I signed up in july last year too. Just waited a couple of days and I was able to signup.

You can always use z.ai or minimax

They ask a phone number to sign up. WTF?

I signed up with openai a while ago and I didn’t need to provide any phone number…. I wanna delete my open ai account, but then I cannot use claude without a phone?

Wow, seriously? I signed my team up for it Thursday.

WTF?! Really? Then the bubble is bursting already.

When I type in 'DELETE', the button just stays disabled for me. When I tried to make the request through their 'Privacy' portal, I receive a mysterious 'Session expired' error message, and now I've been locked out with the message 'Too many failed attempts'...

Yeah they intentionally broke it. So on Monday morning, instead of just deleting my account, I will be terminating all of the accounts in our company and moving them all to Anthropic. Keep it up, Sam!

It claims that I can’t end my subscription because I signed up on another platform. How odd, once money is involved suddenly our AGI contender can’t implement basic features. Or I’m a fool somehow.

Failed logging in again to delete my OpenAI/ChatGPT account with, “ An unexpected error occurred while creating your session.”

yeah, does not work for me either. Whatever I put in the DELETE input field, the button is still inactive,

Edit: Had to "submit a request".

So glad they let me request my account and data deleted, really grateful /s

I suspect that the export feature is going to be "broken" for a good long while; I've been waiting for mine since 8 am ... a little over 5 hours now.

More reasons to go with the competition

Does "putting them in the agreement" mean "we will never allow them," or "we will not allow them if they are illegal?" Here's a link which says that the DoD was willing to make up with anthropic any time if they allowed surveillance of Americans: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/anthropic-pentagon-supply-c...

Another leak says the agreement "reflects existing law and the pentagon's policies." https://www.axios.com/2026/02/27/pentagon-openai-safety-red-...

Seems like Altman wants to spin this as the same principled stand anthropic took, but they really caved to the DoD's "all legal applications" framing. Up to you to decide how much you think the law restrains the Pentagon here.

Altman wanted to you to believe he got the same deal Amodei didn't, because he has the art of deal.

There is almost certainly more to this whole DoD-Anthropic story than is getting through.

That's what Altman tweeted. Did it actually happen?

The stories I’ve been reading say that the DoW’s agreement with OpenAI contain the very same limitations as the agreement with Anthropic did. In other words, they pressured Anthropic to eliminate those restrictions, Anthropic declined, then they made a huge fuss calling them “a radical left, woke company,” put them on the supply-chain risk list, then went with OpenAI even though OpenAI isn’t changing anything either.

The whole story makes no sense to me. The DoW didn’t get what they wanted, and now Anthropic is tarred and feathered.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/trump-will-end-government-use-of...

“OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said the company’s deal with the Defense Department includes those same prohibitions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, as well as technical safeguards to make sure the models behave as they should.”

They are desperate for cash.

The US govt is fighting against true immorality in this very hour, the radical Muslim Iranian government who has been murdering thousands of citizens and holding the population hostage for decades. Ask the Iranian people if they think openai is immoral.

> there's a way to send a message with only a 30 day hiatus

And that message would be "We have a product so valuable/useful that not even their weak ideals and moral obligations could keep them away!"

Just use a different LLM lol. It’s not even the best one anymore

Whom do we trust regulation with? Current US admin which is being run by team idiocracy, Europe that is run by senile men who don't even understand tech or can't even come to a consensus on smallest of issues or China which only does things that benefit their autocrats?

The issue is much more complex than "just regulate it" unfortunately.

Sure, but the reality is that the United States where these companies are headquartered currently has the exact opposite policy: Anthropic has been blacklisted by the DoW (and replaced by OpenAI) because the US administration thought that the very limited amount of self-regulation Anthropic insisted on was going too far.

We need an AI workers union. The real power and discernment is in the hands of the people building these systems. They are extremely difficult to replace and firing them basically guarantees they go to a competitor.

https://notdivided.org/ is basically validation that there is appetite for something like this amongst them.

I’m all for regulation of AI, but that’s not a serious solution where the problem is the government pressuring private companies to do evil things. Consumer pressure isn’t much, but it’s not nothing.

> Next week Anthropic will do something evil and everyone will be moving back to OpenAI.

Anthropic has been, relatively speaking, the most responsible of the frontier labs since its founding. There has never been a point at which OpenAI took a more measured and reasonable approach while Anthropic proceeded dangerously.

These are relative terms, but you'd have to not be paying attention to find this plausible.

Maybe we should regulate Government.

This is obviously the ideal, but we have to operate in reality as it is today while pushing in the direction of the ideal.

Is this how you justify not doing anything?

We don't regulate, governments do.

The problem is, who is "we".

When EU tries to regulate AI, they are accused of being against progress and will destroy their economies.

Any regulation that Trump would place on AI would be of the "do what I say and f*k up my opponents" kind. Which arguably is already happening.

What does “regulate AI” even mean?

The applications it can be used for? That doesn’t work, it’s the governments that want abusive applications.

The size of models? That doesn’t work, it just discourages MoE.

Access by consumers? Great, now it’s just for megacorps and the military.

What, exactly, would successful regulation look like?

capitalism cannot progress with regulation

I personally am getting better results with codex recently. Claude ($20 plan) honestly comes across as a total ai slop turd of an app (unreliable, frequent incidents, burns through the token after 2-3 prompts that just clinfinite loop doing nothing). Codex will iterate much faster.

The least of the bad guys. The red line is still far away from being good guys.

> when I saw Altman driving a multimillion dollar car while OpenAI was still a nonprofit

If that would be a first time founder that would be much more of a red flag than for someone’s who’s already beyond rich and powerful even before OpenAI became a thing.

> Claude Code in the last three months has finally made it possible to dump Windows and buy a loaded MacBook Pro

What does this mean?

Tangent, but:

> The open source models are extraordinarily effective.

Which models are you referring to? (And in particular, which sizes/versions?)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189650

Dang must be asleep, it's a political post essentially.

Duck.ai seems good, as is Proton’s Lumo.

Mass surveillance may be illegal anyway as you say, but what is the relevance of that? I hope you don't take it being illegal to imply that the government isn't going to do it.

Recently I left an HN comment pointing out that there was a typo on Ars Technia's staff page. One copy editor had the title "Copy Editor" and the other "Copyeditor." Several days later the typo was fixed. I'm confident that it was because someone at Ars saw my comment.

I left a comment describing how I am deleting my OpenAI account. I think there's a good chance someone at OpenAI sees it, even if only aggregated into a figure in a spreadsheet. Maybe a pull quote in a report.

You do your best at the margin, have faith it will count for something in aggregate and accept that sometimes you're tilting at windmills. I know most of my breathe is wasted but I can't reliably tell which.

Because openAI is the least trustworthy of the Big LLM providers. See S(c)am Altman's track record, especially his early comments in senate hearings where:

* he warned of engagement-optimisation strategies, like social media, being used for chatbots / LLMs.

* also, he warned that "ads would be the last resort" for LLM companies.

Both of his own warnings he casually ignored as ChatGPT / openAI has now fully converted to Facebook's tactics of "move fast and break things" - even if it is society itself. A complete turn away from the original AI for science lab it was founded as, which explains why every real (founding) ML scientist has left the company years ago.

While still being for-profit outfits, at least DeepMind and Anthrophic are headed by actual scientists not marketing guys.

Any one individual's vote is probably not going to change the result of an election. So, why do people vote? Individual actions in aggregate have effects. And even if you think it's ultimately futile, sometimes it's about saying "I don't think this is acceptable."

Maybe people believe that the US is better off not having a government that coerces private companies? This is a way of showing that.

/non-US and just guessing

It's all about money in the end. If people keep spending money with these companies, it reinforces their notion that the money will keep flowing despite what they do. Cancelling slows down that revenue stream, giving time for other entities which are less misanthropic to catch up and counterbalance the negative side effects from these companies.

When did the US poulation stop believing in a better society and world? A bad progression is something that can be fixed. We do not need AI in weapons, we need a law that forces the children of presidents starting war to automatically be conscripted to the front line of said war.

“Predictive programming“ in action. Predicting something beforehand and getting used to it should’t make a wrong thing acceptable.

Ethics is about knowing and acting right or wrong. Not about how we feel about them.

Kind of signal that we do not want to pay for our surveillance ourselves. I did not write funeral though.

We are obviously dying. What's the point of doing anything in between now and the last moment? What goal of people who think that doing anything will make any impact?

--

Some people do that as a symbolic action. Some to keep own terms as much as they can. Some hope their actions will join others actions and will turn into a signal for decision makers. For others this action reduces the area of their exposure. Others believe in something and just follow their beliefs.

BTW following own set of beliefs is what you're (we all) doing here. You believe that surveillance is already happening and nothing can be done about it, that single action does not matter, that there are no other reasons for action other than direct visible impact, etc. Seems that you analyze others through own set of beliefs and it can not explain actions of others. This inability to explain others suggests that the whole model is flawed in some way. So what is the nature of your beliefs? Did you choose them or they were presented you without alternatives? What are alternatives then? Do these beliefs serve your interests or others?

It's more about personal choice than making a grand impact. Many people want control over their digital footprint, given the rapid evolution of AI and its implications for privacy.

The actions of the US government here are openly corrupt.

The point of the supply chain risk provisions is to denote, you know, supply chain risks. The intention is not to give the Pentagon a lever it can pull to force any company to agree to any contract it wants.

Hegseth doesn't even pretend that Anthropic is actually a supply chain risk. The argument for designating them so is that _they won't do exactly what the government wants_.

People use the term "fascism" a lot and people have kind of tuned it out, but what do you call a government that deals itself the power to compel any company to accept any contract, and declare it a pariah on thin pretext if it objects?

By taking the deal under these conditions OpenAI is accepting this. They're saying, "Well, sucks to be them, life goes on". They're consenting to the corruption and agreeing to profit from it. But they'll be next, and if the next company in line has the same stand then yeah, the government can force any company to do anything. There's nothing normal about this.

AI will get access to missiles, fighter jets, attack drones, and even nuclear launch codes - that's the fear.

Even when the bombs drop from the sky, at least those humans who had deleted their OpenAI account can rest easy, knowing that that they weren't the ones supporting the AI that will delete humanity.

You will probably never actually be able to create actual Claude chats from OpenAI chats, but you could ask Claude to read and distill your old OpenAI chats into Claude chat context. It won’t be the same, but it’s better than nothing, depending on what you’re hoping to get out of it.

They factually already have a legal requirement to keep every single chat so it's pretty misleading to say they're hard deleted when they never are

Logically and legally equivalent to "we will keep your data forever unless legally required to delete it.".

I don’t see what’s unclear about that account deletion page to be honest. It reads clearly to me that the account has been deleted and if you want to use the same email again, you can create an entirely new account using the same email, but it doesn’t reactivate the account.

If you’re in California, the move is to file a CCPA Delete request. IANAL but it seems illegal to process that request and allow account to be resurrected.

...seems to me you should try to spend down those credits first, even if it's on something completely useless. Otherwise you're giving them free money (they never had to spend the compute).

% of decision makers less relevant than % of recurring spend — decision makers over spend for 10s to 100s of Ks of “seats” are here.

The PR strategy described here is often referred to as "The Overton Window Shift" or "Strategic Iteration." Essentially, OpenAI (or any entity using this tactic) enters a negotiation or public debate by asserting a position that seems flexible or "safety-first." When a competitor like Anthropic holds a firm ethical line, the entity uses aggressive framing—or coordinates with third parties—to paint that competitor as an outlier or "radical." By the time the dust settles and the entity signs a deal with the exact same restrictions they previously criticized, the public and stakeholders have been fatigued by the controversy. The goal is to normalize their own brand as the "pragmatic" choice while the competitor remains "tarred and feathered," effectively moving the goalposts of acceptable behavior until the original contradiction is ignored.

I'm Eu, and very grateful to the US, and the military wing of the US, for the peace we've had - and take for granted. But, things change. And the US has shown itself to be unreliable, and vindictive, too.

He's a Thiel disciple. Thiel orchestrated Trumps digital campaign. The End.

It's weird to assume there would be a dip if it were publicly traded.

"The company I hold just secured a government contract. Better sell it." - Imaginary Shareholder

Great for you surfin' musk's hype wave while he turns the world into his own fascist dominion. At least you made some bucks along the way! Those come certainly in useful - albeit are quickly depleted - once you live in a totalitarian world where every interaction with the monopolistic oligarchic big-tech-state monster requires a bribe, probably in shitcoins. (see the Russian oligarchic state that the US is quickly progressing towards - apparently Russians have no word for "bribe", as it's common practice to give gov agents "gifts" if you want anything being done.)

Sometimes threads are flagged, sometimes they aren't. This is how HN has always worked. For the most part it depends on the users.

You can use Anthropic btw.

I assume you missed this announcement from OpenAI:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189650

You're out of the loop and making baseless assumptions.

This thread is currently trending because OpenAI just slid into the US CorpGov's DMs and signed a contract, hours after Anthropic was banned by the US government for not letting the military do whatever they want.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

https://x.com/secwar/status/2027507717469049070

Claude was very easy to unsubscribe from. I barely use it anymore anyways, primarily use Gemini

My understanding is that the DOD signed the terms of service, and are now trying to renegotiate them. Anthropic has declined to change the terms. This makes the government angry.

What a weird thing to say.