AI Graveyard: Major Products and Startups That Shut Down — SkimNews
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- Relay, a five-year-old AI-powered workflow automation tool positioned as a Zapier alternative, shut down on Monday after larger platforms including OpenAI and Google built similar automation features directly into their own tools.
- S&P Global Market Intelligence found that approximately 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents, citing insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, scaling difficulties, or weak user demand as common causes.
- OpenAI rolled back its July 9 attempt to convert ChatGPT into a broader "super app" combining Chat, Codex, and Work modes after users criticized the redesign as confusing; the company has separately shut down standalone products including the ChatGPT Atlas browser (discontinued August 9), Operator, and the Sora video-sharing platform (shut down March 2026).
- Apple repeatedly delayed its upgraded Siri AI features from Apple Intelligence, contributing to a $250 million settlement over claims regarding how the company marketed the iPhone 16's AI capabilities; the AI-powered Siri finally appeared in the iOS 27 beta in July and is rolling out to English-language users this month.
- Microsoft's Recall feature, announced at Build 2024 as an AI-powered "photographic memory" for Windows PCs, was delayed nearly a year amid privacy and security backlash; a cybersecurity researcher recently built a tool that could extract and display data captured by Recall, reviving concerns about the redesign.
- Humane's AI Pin, which raised $230 million from investors, shut down in February 2025 after struggling with performance and a battery fire risk in its charging case; HP acquired most of the company's assets for $116 million.
- Rabbit's R1 AI device sold 100,000 units after its January 2024 CES unveiling but was widely panned as unfinished; the company continues updating it and recently announced "Project Cyberdeck," a new portable hardware project aimed at vibe-coding.
Why it matters: The 42% AI abandonment rate from S&P Global quantifies what the graveyard illustrates: most corporate AI bets fail to find durable product-market fit, and the casualties span both venture-backed startups and trillion-dollar incumbents. Investors burned $230M on Humane before HP bought its assets for $116M, while Apple absorbed a $250M settlement over its hyped Siri AI — a reminder that AI failure carries real balance-sheet consequences, not just bad press.
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