AI tools that died (or got acquired) in 2025–2026

Our AI Graveyard records every tool we have tracked to a confirmed end — some that shut down outright, rather more that were acquired and folded into something bigger. Most of those moves happened in the last 18 months.

We keep the Graveyard for two reasons. First: if you used a tool that quietly disappeared, this is the one place online that will tell you where it went. Second: a directory that only celebrates wins isn't a directory, it's a sales brochure. So here's the honest record of 2025–2026.

Update, September 20, 2026: the 2026 ledger

The list below was written in May and stops in March 2026. The registry has moved a long way since: as of September 25, 2026 our AI graveyard holds 343 endings — 151 shutdowns, 77 acquisitions where the product was sunset, and 115 acquisitions where it still ships — and 120 of them carry a 2026 date. Here is what 2026 has actually looked like, with one correction to the May text.

First, the correction. May's entry for Sora said the original was "genuinely gone" because Sora 2 replaced it. Sora itself was then retired in the spring of 2026, and OpenAI's Sora 2 video API shuts down on September 24. Two other lines below were wrong on the day: a placeholder price on the Preligens entry that should never have gone live, and a sentence claiming half the tools we listed a year ago are now in the graveyard. The real share is about one in ten. Both are fixed in the body.

The 2026 acquisitions. Forty-four entries in the registry carry a 2026 acquisition date; twenty-nine of those products still ship. The size of the deals is the story. SpaceX bought Cursor and its parent Anysphere in June, the largest startup acquisition on record, with terms never confirmed by either side. NVIDIA agreed to buy Hugging Face for about $12.93 billion on September 3 and, in August, paid Poolside $6 billion to license its model factory and hire the team, a deal Poolside itself says is not an acquisition. Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter for a reported $7 billion-plus in August. Salesforce signed for Fin, the agent Intercom spun out, at $3.6 billion in June and closed on September 10. Qualcomm bought Modular in June at a reported $4 billion, Schneider Electric bought Cognite at $3.1 billion, and Bending Spoons bought two collaboration-software companies in five weeks: Airtable in August and Miro on September 10, both at a fraction of their 2021 valuations. Below that tier: Forethought to Zendesk (March), LivePerson to SoundHound (April), Kumo to NVIDIA (June), GPTZero to Superhuman (June), Topaz Labs to Adobe (June), Warmly to HubSpot and Common Room to Zoom (June and July), StackAI to Asana, Highspot to Seismic, and Brex to Capital One.

The quieter folds. The acqui-hire pattern from 2024 is alive: Rilo to Adobe (September 2, team and licence, product shut), NextSlide to OpenAI, Agency to Klaviyo (bought August 5, wound down August 31), Continue to Cursor, Clarifai's team to Nebius, Neptune to OpenAI, Robin AI to Microsoft, OneAI to monday.com, Poke and TierZero to Cognition, and TruckSmarter, which told 500,000 carriers it had been acquired and switched its app off three days later without ever naming the buyer.

The 2026 shutdowns. Fifty-seven entries carry a 2026 shutdown date: thirty-nine announced or observed closures, fifteen lapsed domains, three abandoned. The ones with names you will recognise: Phind shut on January 16, a month after raising; OpenAI closed ChatGPT Atlas on August 9, 292 days after launch, and retired DALL·E 3 on May 12; LOVO filed for Chapter 7 liquidation on May 27; Relay.app wound down after Google hired its founder for Chrome, with the last paying customers cut off on September 14; Roo Code was archived in May and redirected to a cloud successor; Arcane, an Accel-backed content copilot that had raised $6 million, and Atla, a YC evaluation startup, both closed in the spring. Most of the rest never announced anything, which is why we run the graveyard.

Rebrands since May. Windsurf, itself the rebrand of Codeium listed below, has been folded into Devin Desktop by Cognition since June 2. Formula Bot now trades as Better Analyst, X-Design as Zawa AI, and the property-data company CoreLogic as Cotality.

What 2026 adds to the patterns. The May text says enterprise SaaS incumbents were the buyers. In 2026 the biggest cheques came from companies that do not sell AI at all — a rocket company, a payments processor, an app consolidator, a card issuer, an industrial-automation group — and the deal that dominated the year was a chipmaker buying the place open models are distributed. And a new pattern showed up three times in a single September fortnight: companies that were bought and whose products were buried in the same announcement. Bought or buried was the title of our consolidation piece; the honest 2026 answer is increasingly both, which is why the graveyard tracks three outcomes rather than two. The month-by-month record lives in our news roundups, June, July and August, and the analysis in Bought or buried.

The big shutdowns

Builder.ai (May 2025) — bankruptcy plus reporting on fabricated customer claims. The cautionary tale of the cohort. We unpublished the listing rather than leave it as a graveyard entry; the brand is poisoned.

Crowdfire (May 2025) — couldn't survive the AI-native social tools wave. A reminder that the social-media-management category got disrupted as fast as anything in 2025.

Sora original (December 2025) — moved to the Graveyard when OpenAI replaced it with Sora 2. Same brand, fresh model, but the original product — and its specific capability set — is genuinely gone.

Bard (February 2024) — rebranded to Gemini. Technically not dead, but the Bard name and product surface ended; we list it for searchers who remember the original.

The shutdown pattern of the year: products that didn't have a defensible position when ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini consolidated the top.

The big acquisitions

The bigger story of 2025–2026 isn't shutdowns — it's consolidation. Enterprise platforms bought capabilities they couldn't build fast enough, and a wave of mid-tier AI products got rolled up.

The notable enterprise rolls:

• Moveworks → ServiceNow ($2.85B, December 2025)
• Streamlit → Snowflake ($800M, originally 2022, fully integrated 2024)
• Exscientia → Recursion ($688M, August 2024)
• Protect AI → Palo Alto Networks ($500M, August 2025)
• Drift → Salesloft ($500M, February 2024)
• Deci AI → NVIDIA ($300M, May 2024)
• Paperspace → DigitalOcean ($111M, July 2023)
• Flatiron Health → Roche ($1.9B)

The quieter folds (these don't get press releases but they matter for buyers who relied on these products):

• Adept → Amazon (acqui-hire, June 2024)
• Reclaim → Dropbox (August 2024)
• MarketMuse → Siteimprove (2024)
• Wonder Dynamics → Autodesk (May 2024)
• Magnific → Freepik (May 2024)
• Mokker → Photoroom (June 2024)
• Hazy → SAS (June 2024)
• EigenTech → Cohere (September 2024)
• Clipdrop → Jasper (February 2024)
• Aporia → Coralogix (January 2025)
• Pocus → Apollo.io (March 2026)
• Langfuse → ClickHouse (December 2025)
• Weights & Biases → CoreWeave (May 2025)
• Limitless → Meta (December 2025)
• Olive → Waystar (2023)
• Zyro → Hostinger (2023)
• Galileo AI → Google
• Preligens → Safran (December 2023)

The rebrands worth knowing

A handful of products didn't die or get acquired — they rebranded hard enough that you might not find them under the old name:

• Codeium → Windsurf
• CodiumAI → Qodo
• Phrasee → Jacquard
• Voicify AI → Jammable
• Foundry → Mithril
• Synthetaic → RAIC Labs

If you're searching for the old name and hitting dead ends, that's where they went.

What this tells us about the market

A few patterns are worth naming:

Consolidation accelerated. 2024 was an "everyone raises a round" year. 2025–2026 was an "everyone gets bought" year. Buyers should assume that mid-tier AI products may not exist as standalone offerings 18 months from now.

The voice / avatar / image-gen layer compressed. Mokker into Photoroom, Magnific into Freepik, Wonder Dynamics into Autodesk, Clipdrop into Jasper — the creative tooling layer is now mostly owned by a few aggregators.

Vertical AI got absorbed by enterprise platforms. ServiceNow, Salesloft, Apollo, Dropbox, DigitalOcean — the buyers were enterprise SaaS incumbents protecting their flank, not other AI startups.

Fraud catches up. The Builder.ai case, the 11x AI customer-claim reporting, the Civitai payments shutdown — buyers got more sophisticated about the difference between "AI-powered" and "actually working."

Lessons for buyers picking tools today

A few practical filters that come out of looking at the graveyard:

1. Pick tools with named customers, not just funding. A round closing tells you a VC believed; a customer logo tells you somebody paid.
2. Check the lifecycle field on a directory before committing. About one in ten of the tools we track has reached the Graveyard; the lifecycle field on every listing tells you which, and whether the product still ships after an acquisition.
3. Be sceptical of tools without independent reviews. G2 with 100+ real reviews is signal. A landing page testimonial isn't.
4. Watch for the bigger-buyer pattern. If a tool's category has been hit by 3+ acquisitions in 18 months, the standalone product is unlikely to stay standalone.

Frequently asked questions

How many AI tools have shut down or been acquired? As of September 25, 2026 our AI graveyard tracks 343 AI tools that reached a confirmed end: 151 shut down entirely, 77 were acquired and then sunset, and 115 were acquired but still operate under their own brand. Entries are added as they are verified, so the total rises through backfill as well as through new events; 120 entries carry a 2026 date.

Which AI tools shut down in 2026? Named 2026 closures in our registry include Phind (January 16), Yupp (March), DALL·E 3 (retired May 12), Roo Code (archived May), LOVO (Chapter 7, May 27), Arcane and Atla (spring), Relay.app (wound down July to September), ChatGPT Atlas (August 9) and Sora, retired in spring with its API closing September 24. Fifty-seven registry entries carry a 2026 shutdown date; most of the rest went dark without an announcement.

Which AI companies were acquired in 2026? The largest were Cursor and Anysphere to SpaceX (June), Hugging Face to NVIDIA at about $12.93 billion (September 3), OpenRouter to Stripe (August), Fin to Salesforce at $3.6 billion (closed September 10), Modular to Qualcomm, Cognite to Schneider Electric, and Airtable and Miro to Bending Spoons. Forty-four registry entries carry a 2026 acquisition date, and twenty-nine of those products still ship.

Where to go from here

• Browse the Graveyard — full searchable list with filters by year and cause.
• The Top 100 — our editorial picks of tools that look likely to still be there next year.
• How we review tools — the methodology behind every rating in our directory.

— The ToolDirectory.AI editorial team