AI Graveyard Expands as Relay, Character.ai and Big Tech Projects Fold

TechCrunch also listed Character.ai, the chatbot platform, which filed for bankruptcy just five years after launching. The list is broader than a set of startup failures: S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates that about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by corporate parents, according to the report, with insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, difficulty scaling and weak user demand among the reasons. TechCrunch framed the list as a record of what the attempts can teach the industry rather than a scorecard of flops.

Even the largest AI companies have casualties. OpenAI, one of the most valuable private companies in the world, tried to turn ChatGPT into a broader “super app” on July 9 by combining separate “Chat,” “Codex” and “Work” modes and renaming the traditional version “ChatGPT Classic.” Users criticized the new interface as confusing and cluttered, and OpenAI rolled the change back soon after.

OpenAI has also shut several standalone apps and folded features into ChatGPT. ChatGPT Atlas, a standalone AI-powered web browser, lasted less than a year before being discontinued on August 9, with its most useful features absorbed into ChatGPT. The company did the same with Operator, an AI agent that could browse the web and complete tasks on a user’s behalf, and it has increasingly built image generation into ChatGPT, shrinking DALL-E’s role 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.

Apple’s Siri AI is another delayed project on the list. When Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence in 2024, an improved Siri was a highlighted feature, pitched as able to understand context, know what was happening across apps and complete tasks. Apple repeatedly pushed back the release, citing engineering issues and bugs, and the delay contributed to a $250 million settlement over claims about how Apple marketed the AI capabilities of the iPhone 16. Siri AI finally appeared in the iOS 27 beta in July, and the new AI-powered version is rolling out to English-language users this month, with other languages expected to follow.

Microsoft’s Recall feature was announced at Build 2024 as an AI-powered “photographic memory” for Windows PCs that would periodically take screenshots so users could search their digital history. The announcement drew immediate backlash over privacy and security, with critics arguing Recall could create a searchable archive of passwords, private messages, financial details and other activity. Microsoft delayed the feature for nearly a year to rethink protections. Even after a redesign, a cybersecurity researcher recently built a tool that could extract and display data Recall had captured, reviving questions about whether the underlying problem was fixed.

Notion Mail launched in April 2025 as an AI-focused email product to help users organize and automate inboxes, but the company found users were turning to separate AI agents for email instead; Notion Mail is scheduled to shut down on September 22. TechCrunch also included the Humane AI Pin among the best-known failures in AI hardware. Humane raised $230 million for a wearable designed to provide AI features without a traditional smartphone, but the product struggled with performance.