From Apple's repeatedly delayed Siri AI to OpenAI's messy "super app" launch, a growing list is tracking the AI projects and startups that shut down or badly missed expectations. TechCrunch published a running AI graveyard on October 24, 2026, cataloguing the most notable casualties — and the reasons behind them.
The record spans tech giants and startups alike. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents. The causes vary: insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, difficulty scaling, or simply weak user demand.
The framing is deliberate. The list is presented less as a scorecard of flops than as a record of what these attempts can teach the rest of the industry — and a reminder that even the biggest players are not immune.
OpenAI's super app and the collapse of Sora
OpenAI, one of the most valuable private companies in the world, has had its own share of casualties. On July 9, it updated ChatGPT to combine separate "Chat," "Codex," and "Work" modes while renaming the traditional version "ChatGPT Classic." Users found the new interface confusing and cluttered, and OpenAI rolled the change back.
The company has also shut down several stand-alone apps and folded their features into ChatGPT. ChatGPT Atlas, a stand-alone AI-powered web browser, lasted less than a year before being discontinued on August 9. The same happened to Operator, an AI agent that could browse the web and complete tasks on a user's behalf.
Image generation has been increasingly built directly into ChatGPT, shrinking the role of DALL-E as a separate destination. Sora, OpenAI's video-sharing platform, struggled with high operating costs and user-retention challenges and shut down in March 2026.
Startups that never made it
The list is heavy with startups that ran out of room. Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool built as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely in August. It let users automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but as OpenAI, Google, and other larger platforms built similar automation directly into their own tools, the five-year-old product struggled to hold on to a reason to exist.
