According to a report in TechCrunch, the AI-powered automation tool Relay, built as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely in August. The product allowed users to automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but as larger platforms such as OpenAI and Google built similar automation directly into their own tools, five-year-old Relay struggled to hold on to a reason to exist as a stand-alone product. More recently, chatbot platform Character.ai filed for bankruptcy just five years after its launch.
Beyond Character.ai and Relay, many AI bets do not survive even inside the companies that build them. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence data, about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents. The reasons vary, including insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, difficulty scaling, or simply weak user demand. The result is a growing list of abandoned products, serving as a record of what these attempts may teach the rest of the industry.
Automation Tools and Chat Platforms: The Retreat of Relay and Character.ai
The shutdown of Relay illustrates the struggle of stand-alone products. Relay offered users the ability to automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but when companies like Google and OpenAI began building similar automation directly into their own tools, the five-year-old automation tool struggled to hold on to a reason to exist as a stand-alone product. More recently, chatbot platform Character.ai filed for bankruptcy five years after launching.
OpenAI: Consolidation Efforts, a Shuttered Browser, and the Super App Retreat
Even the largest players are not immune to setbacks and missteps. OpenAI, one of the highest-valued private companies in the world, has experienced its own series of disruptions and unsuccessful steps. An example of this was its attempt to turn ChatGPT into a "super app." On July 9, OpenAI updated the app to combine several experiences, including separate "Chat," "Codex," and "Work" modes, while renaming the traditional, familiar version "ChatGPT Classic." This redesign quickly drew criticism from users who found the new interface confusing and cluttered, and OpenAI rolled back the change shortly thereafter, restoring the familiar interface.
That was not the company's only attempt to pull everything under one roof. OpenAI has shut down several stand-alone apps and folded their features directly into ChatGPT. The AI-powered web browser ChatGPT Atlas operated for less than a year before its activity was discontinued on August 9, with its most useful features absorbed into ChatGPT. The company acted in the same manner with Operator, an AI agent designed to browse the web and complete tasks on the user's behalf. In addition, OpenAI integrated image generation directly into ChatGPT, thereby diminishing the role of DALL-E as a separate destination for creating images. Furthermore, the company's video-sharing platform, Sora, struggled with high operating costs and user retention challenges, shutting down in March 2026.
Apple and Microsoft: Delays, Privacy Backlash, and a Settlement
Established tech giants have also encountered significant difficulties in rolling out AI capabilities to end users. When Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence in 2024, the Siri assistant upgrade was one of the highlighted features promised. The presentation promised that Siri would understand context, know what is happening across different apps, and execute tasks effectively. However, Apple repeatedly delayed the release of the upgraded Siri due to engineering issues and bugs. These delays ultimately contributed to a $250 million settlement concerning claims over how Apple marketed the AI capabilities of the iPhone 16. The Siri AI version finally appeared in the iOS 27 beta this past July, with the English-language rollout starting this month, and support for additional languages expected to follow.
At the same time, Microsoft announced the Recall feature at its Build 2024 conference, presented as an AI-powered "photographic memory" for Windows PCs. The feature took screenshots periodically to enable users to search back through their digital activity history. Predictably, the announcement triggered an immediate backlash over privacy and security. Critics argued that Recall could create a searchable archive of highly sensitive information, including passwords, private messages, financial details, and other activity. Microsoft delayed the feature for nearly a year, giving the company time to rethink its security and privacy protections. Despite the redesign, the controversy has not gone away: a cybersecurity researcher recently built a tool that succeeded in extracting and displaying data captured by the feature, reviving questions regarding whether Microsoft actually fixed the underlying problem.
AI Hardware: The Struggles of Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1
Attempts to integrate artificial intelligence into dedicated hardware have run into severe obstacles. The AI Pin device by Humane was designed to provide AI capabilities through a wearable device as an alternative to traditional smartphones. The company raised $230 million from investors and garnered broad public attention, but the product suffered from significant performance difficulties. The situation worsened when the company warned customers to stop using the charging case due to a battery fire risk. In February 2025, Humane shut down its AI Pin business, and most of the company’s assets were acquired by HP for $116 million.
Another hardware product that received widespread attention was the Rabbit R1, unveiled at CES in January 2024 as an AI companion that performs tasks on behalf of the user. Although the company reported selling 100,000 units shortly after launch, early reviews determined that the device was unfinished, suffered from unreliable performance, and offered a limited number of useful integrations. Rabbit has not given up on the device and continues to update it as a computer controller for agentic tasks, and even announced a new hardware project called "Project Cyberdeck" intended for vibe-coding.
Products That Shut Down, Pivoted, or Missed Expectations
Additional products that shut down include:
- Notion Mail: Launched in April 2025 as an AI-focused email product designed to help users organize and automate their inboxes. However, the company noticed that its users were using separate AI agents to handle their email inboxes instead. As a result, Notion Mail is scheduled to shut down on September 22.
- Huxe: An AI audio app, built by former developers of Google’s NotebookLM, that converted written information into conversational, podcast-style audio. The company shut down in May 2026, partly as larger platforms began offering similar experiences to large existing audiences; for instance, Spotify expanding its AI-powered audio tools.
- Yupp: A free playground that allowed users to compare responses from hundreds of AI models side by side. Users could also vote on responses and earn cryptocurrency through the platform. At its peak, the platform let users test more than 800 models, including from companies such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. But according to its founders, Yupp never achieved strong enough product-market fit to survive, and the platform shut down in March 2026.
- Figgs AI: Operated from 2023 to 2024, letting users create and interact with customizable AI characters for role-play and storytelling. The platform reportedly drew more than 1 million users, but its developers said keeping the service free became too expensive to sustain, and they shut it down.