Dump Big Tech

Dump Big Tech is the central demand-and-framing of the August 2026 "Week of Action: Stop the Big Tech Takeover", a coordinated national mobilization executed across more than 20 states during Congressional August recess by a coalition anchored by the Sunrise Movement, People's Action Institute, Food & Water Watch, Kairos, MediaJustice, and Free Press, alongside QuitGPT, the Young Democratic Socialists of America, Make the Road, Third Act, and Athena. The campaign is carried in the corpus through the Dump Big Tech (August 2026) campaign and the QuitGPT consumer boycott, which co-organized the campaign's highest-profile action.

Demands

The framing unified three demands across the week's actions: (1) stricter AI regulation — specifically blocking federal preemption of state AI laws; (2) an end to federal Big Tech partnerships, targeting OpenAI's Pentagon surveillance contract, Palantir's ICE data systems, and Google's government AI programs; and (3) energy and water usage caps for data centers, addressing the environmental footprint of AI infrastructure buildout as a community harm.

Week of action — August 2026

Actions ran August 9–16 and extended beyond. The August 10 occupation of OpenAI's DC lobbying office — in which more than 30 student activists held "The Workshop" near the White House for two hours, unfurling banners reading "Stop Stealing Our Future" and "OpenAI Bought My Senator," before police arrested 13 participants for unlawful entry — was the campaign's highest-profile anchor. August 13 actions in New York City targeted Palantir's and Google's NYC offices, coordinated by Make the Road, United Ratepayers, Food & Water Watch, and People's Action Institute; many protesters wore masks to prevent facial recognition tracking. Across the 20+ state actions, the campaign also targeted constituent visits to Congress members in New York, New Jersey, California, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, and data center construction sites in Oregon and West Virginia. PUSH Buffalo, operating inside People's Action Institute's network, extended the framing to a $1.46 billion data center subsidy fight in Genesee County, NY — connecting AI infrastructure expansion directly to ICE surveillance and Indigenous land use in the same framing register.

Movement carriage

The framing converges three active movement threads: QuitGPT's OpenAI consumer boycott (launched January 2026 following the Pentagon contract and Brockman family donations to the Trump super PAC); Sunrise's electoral accountability campaign targeting OpenAI's $140+ million super PAC midterm spending; and the Fight Data Centers community organizing coalition's environmental-justice frame — unifying them under a single public demand in the reactive window opened by Congressional recess. "AI is not inevitable" — voiced at the NYC actions — echoes the same core claim the Fight Data Centers framing carries at the infrastructure layer. The framing's Palantir and ICE surveillance targeting connects to No Tech For ICE through the same supply-chain logic, and to No Tech For Apartheid through the shared demand that federal contracts with companies enabling state violence be ended.