The AI graveyard: a running list of projects and startups that didn’t make it

The AI market is starting to look less like a gold rush and more like a landfill with a good press team. Relay, an AI workflow tool built as a Zapier alternative, shut down in August after five years. It helped users automate email and task flows with AI agents, but once OpenAI, Google and others started baking similar automation into their own products, Relay’s reason to stand alone got awfully thin.

That pattern shows up everywhere. Character.ai, the chatbot platform, filed for bankruptcy just five years after launch. And S&P Global Market Intelligence says about 42% of AI initiatives are eventually abandoned by the companies that funded them. The reasons are familiar: not enough money, technical headaches, competition, scaling problems, or simply nobody wanting the thing enough.

OpenAI itself has had to eat some of its own mistakes. On July 9, it tried turning ChatGPT into a broader super app by mixing in separate Chat, Codex and Work modes and renaming the old version ChatGPT Classic. Users hated the clutter, so the company backed out. It has also shut down stand-alone products and moved their features into ChatGPT instead, including Atlas, an AI browser that lasted less than a year before being discontinued on August 9, and Operator, the web-browsing agent that no longer needs its own home. DALL-E has also been shrinking as image generation gets folded into ChatGPT. Sora, OpenAI’s video-sharing platform, shut down in March 2026 after struggling with costs and retention.

Elsewhere, the failures are more visible in hardware. Apple kept delaying its Siri upgrade after promising a smarter assistant in 2024, eventually landing itself in a $250 million settlement tied to how the iPhone 16 was marketed. Microsoft’s Recall ran straight into a privacy wall after being pitched as a photographic memory for Windows PCs, and even after a redesign, security concerns haven’t gone away. Humane’s AI Pin raised $230 million, then ended up with HP buying most of the assets for $116 million after performance and battery worries piled up. Rabbit’s R1 sold 100,000 units early on, but reviews called it unfinished. The company is still pushing updates, which is either stubbornness or optimism, depending on the day.

Some of the quieter exits sting just as much. Notion Mail is scheduled to shut down on September 22 after users leaned on separate AI agents instead. Huxe, which turned writing into podcast-style audio, shut down in May 2026 as bigger platforms moved into the same space. Yupp, a model-comparison playground that let users test more than 800 models, couldn’t find enough product-market fit. Figgs AI reportedly drew more than 1 million users before its makers said keeping it free was too expensive. The graveyard is getting crowded.