By Hamza Faisal

For all the breathless talk of an AI revolution, the industry has quietly been building a graveyard. TechCrunch's running list of the AI projects, startups and bets that shut down, pivoted or badly missed expectations — updated on October 24 — reads like a cautionary tour of the boom: even the biggest names in tech have products that did not survive contact with users, costs or regulators.

The list's framing is blunt. "The result is a growing AI graveyard," TechCrunch writes, introducing a catalogue that runs from Apple's repeatedly delayed Siri AI to OpenAI's messy "super app" launch. And the pattern behind the entries is not one single cause of death — it is several, repeating across companies of every size.

OpenAI's own casualties lead the list

OpenAI itself dominates the top of the list. Sora, its video-generation app, shut down in March 2026 after struggling with high operating costs and user-retention problems. ChatGPT Atlas, the company's standalone AI-powered web browser, lasted less than a year before being discontinued on August 9, with its most useful features absorbed into ChatGPT itself.

The same absorbing logic claimed Operator, the agent that browsed the web on a user's behalf, which was folded into ChatGPT, while image generation moved inside the main product and reduced DALL-E from a destination to a feature. Even OpenAI's attempt to turn ChatGPT into a "super app" was rolled back in July, after users found the redesigned interface confusing and cluttered.

Startups eaten by the platforms

The smaller names on the list mostly died the same way: the platforms built their feature. Relay, a five-year-old workflow-automation startup positioned as an AI alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely in August, after OpenAI, Google and other large platforms incorporated similar automation directly into their own tools. TechCrunch's verdict was unsparing: Relay "struggled to hold on to a reason to exist as a stand-alone product."

Other entries tell similar stories. Notion Mail is scheduled to shut down on September 22, after users opted for separate AI agents to handle their email instead of switching clients. Huxe, an AI audio app built by former Google NotebookLM developers, closed in May 2026 as larger platforms expanded their own AI audio tools. Yupp, a free playground for comparing responses from hundreds of AI models side by side, closed in March 2026. Character.ai, the chatbot platform, filed for bankruptcy in October, just five years after launching.

The giants stumble too — and 42% of projects never ship

The biggest companies are not exempt. Apple's repeatedly delayed Siri AI, promised as a smarter assistant, ended in a $250 million settlement over marketing claims. Microsoft's Recall feature, which took constant screenshots of a user's PC, was delayed for roughly a year over privacy concerns. The Humane AI Pin shut down in February 2025, with its assets later going to HP for $116 million, while the Rabbit R1 remains on sale but underperforming.

Behind the individual failures sits a broader statistic: S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates that roughly 42 percent of corporate AI initiatives are abandoned, citing funding, technical and demand problems. The graveyard, in other words, is not just a list of flops — it is a measure of how much of the AI boom never makes it past the demo. For users, the lesson is practical: the AI tool you rely on today may be folded, shut down or settled out of existence tomorrow, no matter how big the logo behind it.

By Hamza Faisal