The AI graveyard: a running list of projects and startups that didn’t make it
A running list of notable AI products, startups, and features that shut down, pivoted, or missed expectations.Summary
The article catalogs notable AI failures as a growing "AI graveyard," noting that according to S&P Global Market Intelligence about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents, due to insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, difficulty scaling, or weak user demand. It details casualties including Relay, an AI workflow automation tool that shut down in August, and Character.ai, which filed for bankruptcy five years after launching. Even major players stumbled: OpenAI rolled back a ChatGPT "super app" redesign, discontinued its Atlas browser, folded Operator and DALL-E features into ChatGPT, and shut down its video platform Sora in March 2026. Other entries include Apple's repeatedly delayed Siri AI, Microsoft's privacy-controversial Recall, Notion Mail (shutting down September 22), the Humane AI Pin (business shut down in February 2025, assets sold to HP for $116 million), the Rabbit R1 (heavily hyped but poorly reviewed, though the company continues updating it), Huxe (shut down May 2026), Yupp (shut down March 2026), and Figgs AI (shut down after free service became too costly). The piece frames these failures less as a scorecard of flops than as a record of lessons for the industry.
(Source：TechCrunch)