I finally left ChatGPT: Here are the 5 steps I took first

ChatGPT has received a lot of negative attention after announcing its partnership with the US Department of Defense, essentially taking the job from Anthropic after the latter company refused to back down on some of its safety protocols. In the days since, many people have considered leaving, and I have personally ended my ChatGPT relationship for good. It was partially over the company’s latest news, but honestly, I’ve been increasingly concerned about OpenAI’s evolution as a company when it comes to privacy and safety.

I won’t tell you whether you should do the same, as that’s a very personal decision. That said, if you are thinking of leaving, there are a few things you should consider first. Here are the key steps I took before moving over to Claude, though they generally apply to any AI tool you choose to migrate to, including Gemini.

The first thing you’ll want to do is get a copy of your existing ChatGPT data. OpenAI makes it easy to back up your full chat history, though it’s not a perfect process.

To make a backup, follow these steps:

• Click on your profile icon, typically at the bottom-left corner.
• Select Settings from the menu that appears.
• Select Data Controls.
• Click the Export button and follow the instructions.

After this, OpenAI will send you an email with your data export. The time this takes can vary. As someone with an extensive chat history, it took about two days the first time.

What do I mean by “first time”? As I said, the process isn’t perfect. My original export was corrupted, likely because I have far more past chats than I’m willing to admit. On the second try, it took another day or so, but that version was actually more complete.

To view the logs, go to wherever you downloaded the archive. Inside, you’ll find an HTML file that lets you read everything in a more navigable way. If it comes out as gibberish, there are two possible fixes.

The first is to try another browser. With a large file, it’s possible it simply isn’t rendering correctly in your default browser. For example, I couldn’t get it to load in Chrome, but Firefox had no issues. If that doesn’t work, your backup may be corrupted, and you’ll need to initiate the process again.

If you’ve used your AI assistant meaningfully and regularly, there’s a good chance the experience has become quite customized. The good news is you can switch tools without completely starting over. Anthropic has an official prompt it recommends for those switching to Claude, but I found it didn’t capture as much detail as I was hoping for.

There are two ways to be more thorough. First, you can go to Settings > Personalization > Manage. This gives you a searchable log you can scroll through and copy to paste into the tool of your choice. You can also delete what ChatGPT knows about you here, which I recommend doing.

I actually did the method above in combination with a method recommended by Limited Edition Jonathan. Like Anthropic’s prompt, it gives you a structured output, but this one doesn’t tip off ChatGPT that you’re leaving and produces richer, more detailed results. The prompt breaks memories down into categories like writing style, key people, personal context, and workflow patterns.

Once I got the response from ChatGPT, I pasted it into a Google Doc, then added my manual memories into the relevant categories. There was a fair amount of redundancy, but I did catch a few things the prompt alone missed.

The next step is bringing that into your new tool. You can simply start a new chat, explain what you’re doing, and ask it to commit those insights to its own memory. If you’re switching to Claude as I did, there’s also a built-in import tool.

Go to the lower right, click your name, then Settings > Capabilities. You’ll find a Start Import button with a field where you can paste your data directly.

While the full backup contains your entire history in theory, it can be messy to navigate. For that reason, I went through my chats and saved the ones I wanted to keep. I used Ctrl+P (or the Print option in Chrome’s three-dot menu) to save them as PDFs.

These were faster to navigate than the full HTML viewer, and uploading a PDF to Claude made it easier to pick up where I left off. It won’t import the full chat log, but it works well as a reference and a way to resume ongoing projects.

Other options include third-party plugins or plain copy and paste. The PDF route just happened to be the fastest for me.

Now it’s time to delete your data. Before doing so, make sure your exported data is downloaded and confirmed not to be corrupted.

To delete your entire chat history, you’ll want to go to Settings > Data Controls > Delete All Chats. This will delete everything, but keep in mind that OpenAI says it can take a month or so to truly remove the data from the servers and that some of it will remain in the system for security or legal reasons or if the data has already been used for training after de-identification.

While not strictly required, it’s also not a horrible idea to go to privacy.openai.com, click Make a Privacy Request, and select Delete my ChatGPT account. This will ensure the account is fully shuttered and is backed by consumer privacy frameworks in several countries. Don’t do this until you’ve already cancelled your subscription and completed all the necessary steps in this guide.

If you previously connected Google Drive or another external service, revoke that access as a precaution. Go to Settings > Apps, and remove any existing integrations from there. Even if you forget, OpenAI is unlikely to have easy access to these authorizations once you close the account, but it’s still better to be safe than sorry.

All that’s left is cancelling your subscription, which can be done from the ChatGPT Plus web interface or app. Those who paid through the App Store or Google Play will need to cancel through the applicable platform directly. As for where to go from here? I’m personally enjoying Claude quite a bit, but Google Gemini is easily my second recommendation. This is especially true for those who want to get the most out of their Android-based AI experiences.