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

Summary

• Character.ai filed for bankruptcy in early October five years after its launch.
• Privacy-focused AI assistant Ollie announced its shutdown on November 6.
• About 42% of AI initiatives are abandoned by their corporate parents due to insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, scaling difficulties, or weak user demand.
• OpenAI rolled back a July 9 redesign of ChatGPT that combined multiple modes into a single interface after users found it confusing.
• OpenAI discontinued ChatGPT Atlas on August 9, absorbing its features into the main ChatGPT app.
• OpenAI folded its Operator AI agent into ChatGPT and integrated image generation directly into the platform, reducing DALL-E's standalone role.
• OpenAI's video-sharing platform Sora shut down in March 2026 due to high operating costs & user-retention challenges.
• Apple delayed the release of its improved Siri AI, contributing to a $250 million settlement over iPhone 16 marketing claims.
• Apple's new AI-powered Siri rolled out to English-language users in the iOS 27 beta this past July.
• Character.ai was founded in 2021 by Noam Shazeer & Daniel De Freitas & raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation in 2023.
• Google paid $2.7 billion in 2024 to license Character.ai's technology & bring its founders back to Google.
• Character.ai faced lawsuits alleging chatbots contributed to teen suicides & self-harm & received a cease-and-desist letter from Disney.
• Character.ai barred under-18 users from open-ended chats late last year & settled several suits with Google in early 2026.
• Disney is the opening bidder for Character.ai's intellectual property with an offer of $20 million.
• Relay, an AI workflow automation tool, shut down entirely in August 2026 after larger platforms built similar features into their own tools.
• Ollie launched in June 2026 as a privacy-focused family assistant but failed to grow or raise enough capital.
• Microsoft's Recall feature was announced in 2024 as a photographic memory tool for Windows PCs but faced immediate privacy backlash.
• Microsoft delayed the Recall feature for nearly a year & continues to face criticism regarding data security.
• Notion Mail, launched in April 2025, is scheduled to shut down on September 22 after users preferred separate AI agents for email.
• Humane shut down its AI Pin business in February 2025 after performance issues & a battery fire risk warning.
• HP acquired most of Humane's assets for $116 million.
• Rabbit R1 launched in January 2024 with claims of 100,000 units sold but received reviews describing it as unfinished.
• Rabbit announced a new hardware project called Project Cyberdeck for vibe-coding.
• Huxe, an AI audio app, shut down in May 2026 as larger platforms expanded their own AI audio tools.
• Yupp, a platform for comparing AI models, shut down in March 2026 due to a lack of product-market fit.
• Figgs AI operated from 2023 to 2024 but shut down because keeping the service free became too expensive.