New AI tools September 2026: the launches, models, deals, and shutdowns

These are the new AI tools of September 2026, the month the big platforms stopped shipping chatbots and started shipping agents. Meta, Apple, OpenAI and Google each shipped or began testing an assistant that acts on your behalf, all within three weeks. Below is our list of new AI tools from September 2026, followed by the month's model releases, deals, and shutdowns. This is edition four of our monthly AI tools news roundup. We track more than 2,800 AI tools and keep a registry of the ones that die or get bought, so this roundup leans on that data as much as on the headlines.

New AI tools that launched in September 2026

The month's most significant launches, in date order:

1. Meta Muse (September 8). A personal AI agent for US users on iOS, Android, the web and WhatsApp. It runs in its own isolated virtual machine, so it can browse, fill out forms and make bookings. It has a free tier, with paid tiers reported at $20 and $100 a month. TechCrunch reported 2.5 million downloads within about two and a half weeks.
2. ChatGPT Images 2.5 (September 8). OpenAI's image model update for ChatGPT, with lower latency and much better multi-turn editing, plus two new API variants.
3. Apple Siri AI, beta (September 14). The rebuilt Siri in iOS and macOS 27, running on models built with Google's Gemini. English only at launch, and not in the EU or China. What makes it significant is distribution: the upgrade goes out to the existing installed base, not only to people who chose to sign up for an assistant.
4. Google "Call for Me" (September 24). A test in which Gemini phones US businesses from your own number and tells them it is an AI.
5. Grok in Tesla vehicles (September 22). Grok can now take multi-step voice errands from the driver's seat.
6. OpenAI Dots (September 29, DevDay). Persistent agents, each with its own cloud computer and connected apps, running on GPT-6 Astra. They are rolling out gradually to Pro and Business Premium users.
7. ChatGPT Space and Sign in with ChatGPT (September 29, DevDay). Space is a shared workspace where people, ChatGPT and Dots edit the same pages and files. Sign in with ChatGPT lets other apps draw on a user's existing Plus or Pro subscription instead of the developer paying for API keys. The second matters more to tool makers: it moves the inference bill from the app to the user.
8. Cognition SWE-2 (September 10). Devin's in-house coding model, post-trained from Kimi K3. The same week, Cognition raised about $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation.

What these launches have in common is where the agent lives. Muse, Dots and Call for Me each run in a sandbox the vendor controls and act through accounts you already have. For the independent tools we list, that is the competitive question going into 2027.

New on the directory in September

New to our catalogue, which is not always the same as newly launched. We added 87 listings in September. Some are brand-new products. Others are established tools we had not yet covered. A selection worth knowing:

• Grok Imagine, xAI's image and video generator, and Google Lyria, DeepMind's music model, which makes tracks up to three minutes long.
• Google Opal, a free no-code builder for chaining prompts, models and tools into apps you can share.
• Seedance 3.0, ByteDance's video model, and Wan, Alibaba Cloud's video model and creator app.
• Laminar, open-source observability for AI agents, and Lightfield, a CRM that fills itself in from email, calls and meetings.
• Dyad, a free, open-source desktop app builder that works with any model.
• HappyRobot and telli — two voice-agent platforms for outbound and inbound phone work.

Of the 87, a noticeable share were agent platforms for a specific industry: lending, procurement, compliance, credentialing and franchise operations. The general-purpose layer is consolidating; the new activity is in agents that do one job inside one industry.

Model releases: a new generation in one month

September was the month the frontier labs moved to their next model generation, nearly all at once. We counted 17 model releases from 11 labs that we could date to September:

• OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on September 3 for limited access, then rolled it out to paid ChatGPT plans on September 4. OpenAI called it the company's first model rated "Critical" for cybersecurity capability. The cheaper GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna followed on September 22, and GPT-6.1 Sol on September 29. Luna is priced at $0.10 per million input tokens.
• Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 on September 1, Claude Opus 5.5 on September 22 at a price 20% below Opus 5, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 on September 28. All are available through Claude.
• Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash on September 2 and the Gemini 3.8 Live speech models on September 15. It announced Gemini 4 Argon on September 30, but with no public release date: it is available only to cyber-defense partners.
• Open weights kept pace. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash shipped under an MIT license on September 10. Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.6 followed on September 22, Moonshot's Kimi K2.8 Preview on September 11 and Alibaba's Qwen-Image-2.1 on September 20.
• Elsewhere: xAI's Grok 4.7 (September 21), ElevenLabs Eleven v4 (September 28), and FLUX 3 Action from Black Forest Labs (September 23). That last one is a robot-control model from the team behind FLUX image generation.

Two patterns stand out. First, the most capable models launched to partners only (Gemini 4 Argon, Claude Mythos 5.1, the Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber variant), so the frontier you can buy now trails the frontier that exists. Second, prices kept falling in the middle tier, which widens the gap we documented in our AI model prices report: model costs drop every quarter while the subscription prices of the tools built on them barely move.

The big one: Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion

On September 3, Nvidia confirmed an agreement to acquire Hugging Face. Its SEC filing puts the total at $12.93 billion, including up to about $1 billion in employee retention. It is the largest company Nvidia has ever bought, nearly double its $6.9 billion purchase of Mellanox. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory approval. CNBC reported the talks on August 27, but the agreement was signed September 2 and announced September 3.

Hugging Face is where most of the open-model ecosystem lives: roughly 3 million models, 1 million applications and 500,000 datasets, used by about 18 million developers. The question for anyone who builds on it is the one we raised about Stripe and OpenRouter last month: infrastructure is valuable because it is neutral, and neutrality is the first thing an owner can quietly change. A hardware vendor now owns the main distribution point for models that run on its competitors' chips.

Deals and consolidation

The rest of September's deals, from our acquisition registry and the business press:

• Miro → Bending Spoons, announced September 10. An all-cash deal at a $1.355 billion enterprise value, about $1.79 billion including net cash, with close expected in Q4. Miro was valued at $17.5 billion in 2022 and has about $600 million in annual recurring revenue. Bending Spoons also completed its Airtable purchase on September 4, a deal we covered in August, and layoffs followed.
• Guardrails AI → Harvey, announced September 9, terms undisclosed. Harvey announced it alongside a $550 million raise. The open-source Guardrails AI framework stays on GitHub under Apache-2.0.
• Stilla → Meta, announced September 9. Stilla, a Stockholm AI-teammate startup, is going to Meta to work on its business agent across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram.
• Surfer → Group Positive, announced September 9. Surfer keeps running as Positive Surfer with plans unchanged.
• Fathom → Superhuman, September 14. The company built around Grammarly bought the Fathom AI notetaker, which had more than 400,000 monthly active users, three months after buying GPTZero.
• Row Zero → Databricks, announced September 24. The billion-row spreadsheet Row Zero is being folded into Genie, Databricks' AI coworker.
• Rilo → Adobe, September 2. Adobe took a technology license and hired the team of Rilo, a year-old Indian go-to-market agent startup that had raised about $1 million.
• Console → Palo Alto Networks, announced September 1 for $500 million in cash. The agreement was signed in July.
• Glass Imaging → OpenAI, reported around September 14 at more than $300 million. The buyer has not confirmed it.

A follow-up from last month: Stripe and OpenRouter both confirmed their deal on August 19, three days after the Bloomberg report we cited. The price has still not been disclosed officially.

The pattern in our registry this month is that September was a month of buying, not burying. Ten registry entries carry a September 2026 event date. Seven are acquisitions where the product keeps shipping under its own name. Two (Rilo and TruckSmarter) are acquisitions where the product was shut down. One is a straight shutdown. That is the reverse of the profile in our consolidation report, where sunsets usually follow about a year after the deal. So read "still operating" with that lag in mind.

Shutdowns and sunsets

From our graveyard desk, September's endings:

• Notion Mail shut down on September 22 across web, desktop and iOS, 17 months after launch. Notion's explanation: more than half of its users were already managing email through Notion agents without opening the inbox. Its own agent made the interface unnecessary.
• TruckSmarter told customers on September 1 that it had been acquired, and the app and its AI Dispatch service went dark on September 4. More than 500,000 carriers used it. The buyer has not been named.
• Relay.app reached its final shutdown on September 14, when paid accounts ended. The wind-down was announced in July, and the founder joined Google's Chrome team.
• OpenAI's Sora 2 Videos API reached end of life on September 24, with no replacement. The consumer Sora app had already closed in April.
• Reve ended image generation on September 27, after an OpenAI investment and the move of part of its research team to OpenAI. Users can export their work until October 31.
• Amazon Mechanical Turk closed on September 30 after 21 years. Much of the early AI training data was labelled on it.

As of October 14, 2026, our graveyard tracks 344 AI tools that shut down or were acquired: 152 gone entirely, 77 acquired and sunset, and 115 acquired but still operating under their own brand. That is up from 274 on August 28. As in previous months, most of the jump is verification catching up with older events: a single sweep on September 25 confirmed dozens of past acquisitions. Only the ten entries above carry a September event date. The running registry and methodology live at the AI graveyard, and the statistical analysis is in The AI Tool Shutdown Rate.

Legal and policy

• The first federal appeals ruling on AI training and fair use. On September 29 the Third Circuit held, in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS, that copying Westlaw headnotes to train a legal-research AI was not fair use. The court explicitly said it was not ruling on generative AI, but every model-training case will now cite it.
• California's AI legislative season ended. Governor Newsom signed child-chatbot safety bills on September 10, with fines of up to $1 million per child. On September 30 he signed 11 more AI bills, including SB 947, the "No Robo Bosses" bill on automated workplace decisions.
• The Justice Department opened an antitrust probe of Nvidia's roughly $20 billion Groq licensing deal, first reported September 9–10. It is the first sign that US regulators may treat "license and hire" deals as acquisitions.
• The EU AI Act had no new milestones in September. The transparency obligations covered in our EU AI Act explainer have applied since August 2. The next deadlines fall in December 2026 and later.

What we're watching in October

• Whether Sign in with ChatGPT gets adopted widely enough to change how AI tools price, by billing the user's subscription instead of paying for inference themselves.
• How quickly Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6 Sol and Gemini 3.8 Flash replace the default models inside the tools we list, and whether any of those tools pass the savings on.
• What regulators in the US and EU do with Nvidia–Hugging Face, now that the Groq probe is open.
• What Bending Spoons does with Airtable's and Miro's pricing and free tiers.

How we source this roundup

Deal and shutdown entries come from our own reviewed registry, the same data behind the AI graveyard. We supplement it with figures from company announcements, SEC filings and the business press, and we mark figures as reported when they are not confirmed. We check every item's event date separately from the claim itself. Several stories that circulated as September news were actually August or July events, and we left them out or labelled them as such. For how we size the market itself, see how many AI tools there are in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

What were the biggest new AI tools of September 2026? Meta Muse, a personal AI agent launched on September 8; the beta of Apple's rebuilt Siri on September 14; and OpenAI's Dots agents and ChatGPT Space, announced at DevDay on September 29. Google also began testing "Call for Me," where Gemini phones businesses on your behalf.

What AI models were released in September 2026? OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra (September 3–4), GPT-6 Sol and Luna (September 22) and GPT-6.1 Sol (September 29). Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 (September 1), Opus 5.5 (September 22) and Sonnet 5.5 (September 28). Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash (September 2) and announced Gemini 4 Argon (September 30) for partners only. DeepSeek released the open-weight V4.1 Flash on September 10.

What was the biggest AI acquisition in September 2026? Nvidia's agreement to acquire Hugging Face, announced on September 3, 2026. Nvidia's SEC filing puts the total at $12.93 billion, including about $1 billion in employee retention. It is the largest company Nvidia has ever bought, and the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

Which AI tools shut down in September 2026? Notion Mail shut down on September 22, Relay.app ended paid accounts on September 14, the TruckSmarter app closed on September 4 after an acquisition, Reve ended image generation on September 27, and OpenAI's Sora 2 Videos API reached end of life on September 24.

Which AI companies were acquired in September 2026? Hugging Face by Nvidia, Miro by Bending Spoons, Guardrails AI by Harvey, Stilla by Meta, Surfer by Group Positive, Fathom by Superhuman, Row Zero by Databricks, Rilo by Adobe, and Console by Palo Alto Networks. OpenAI's purchase of Glass Imaging was reported at more than $300 million but not confirmed.

How many AI tools have shut down or been acquired in 2026? As of October 14, 2026, our graveyard registry tracks 344 AI tools that shut down or were acquired in total, and 121 of those entries are dated 2026. Ten entries carry a September 2026 event date, seven of them acquisitions where the product is still operating.

— The ToolDirectory.AI editorial team