Organised consumer boycott of AI products

Coordinate individual consumers to cancel — or publicly pledge to cancel — paid subscriptions to a named AI product (ChatGPT Plus, Copilot, Midjourney, Perplexity Pro, a specific enterprise-consumer bundle), attached to a specific organising demand the vendor is expected to meet. The pledge machinery — a hosted pledge form, a running counter of confirmed cancellations, a coalition endorsement page, a press-release cadence — is what converts a diffuse consumer sentiment into a legible market signal the vendor's investor-relations, sales, and product teams have to price into their forecasts.

An actor chooses this strategy because it is the movement's lowest-barrier direct-action instrument — the participation cost is a few minutes on a settings page — and because it produces a form of pressure the vendor's other counter-parties cannot supply on the same timeline. Legislative pressure runs on a multi-year cycle; a shareholder resolution runs on the annual proxy cycle; a boycott produces a downward revision to the vendor's ARR forecast in the current quarter. The strategy also converts the movement's abstract governance demand — model refusal on autonomous weapons, transparency on training-data provenance, retraction of a specific deployment — into a demand the vendor's own subscription-metrics dashboard makes legible in real time.

It trades scale for substitution risk. The pledge mechanism produces a public commitment more powerful than a private cancellation, but a cancellation that migrates the consumer to a competitor AI product is not a market signal against AI — it is a churn event the vendor's competitor absorbs at no net movement gain. The strategy therefore lives or dies on whether the demand's framing routes the movement toward non-AI alternatives or toward governance-compliant AI alternatives, and the sectoral coalition composition (democracy, climate, labour) is what determines which of the two the pledge machinery communicates. The instrument is also captured by the vendor's price-and-feature response: a targeted vendor that responds with a compliance concession removes the boycott's target, but a targeted vendor that responds with a subscription-price cut fragments the coalition by giving reluctant participants an off-ramp back into use.

The strategy pairs at the consumer-pay-side register with creator-class collective bargaining (supplier-side refusal of AI training on rights-holder work), with institutional procurement refusal (institutional-buyer-side), and with cross-professional refusal (professional-body-side). All four are refusal strategies operating on different counter-parties in the vendor's revenue stack; the consumer arm is the register the other three cannot reach, and the aggregate leverage of a coordinated four-arm refusal push is what defines the strategy's ceiling.