# The State of AI Tool Mortality

> Original research by ToolDirectory.AI. As of 2026-07-16. Source: https://tooldirectory.ai/research/ai-tool-mortality. License: CC BY 4.0.

Of the 2550 AI tools ToolDirectory.AI has tracked, 217 (8.5%) have shut down or been acquired.

## Headline numbers

- Tools tracked: 2550
- Retired (shut down or acquired): 217
- Mortality rate: 8.5%
- Hard shutdowns: 101
- Acquisitions: 116
- Acquired but still shipping under own brand: 62 (53.4% of acquisitions)
- Worst year on record: 2025 (89 retirements)

## Retirements by cause

| Cause | Count | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Acquired and sunset | 116 | 53.5% |
| Domain lapsed | 50 | 23% |
| Shut down | 50 | 23% |
| Abandoned | 1 | 0.5% |

## Retirements by year (deceasedAt)

| Year | Count |
| --- | --- |
| 2018 | 1 |
| 2019 | 1 |
| 2020 | 3 |
| 2021 | 4 |
| 2022 | 5 |
| 2023 | 21 |
| 2024 | 48 |
| 2025 | 89 |
| 2026 | 44 |

## Most active acquirers

| Acquirer | Tools absorbed |
| --- | --- |
| NVIDIA | 7 |
| OpenAI | 7 |
| Cursor (Anysphere) | 3 |
| Google | 3 |
| Meta | 3 |
| Salesforce | 3 |
| Adobe | 2 |
| Amazon | 2 |
| Calabrio | 2 |
| Databricks | 2 |

## Categories with the most retirements

| Category | Dead tools |
| --- | --- |
| Developer Tools | 32 |
| AI Infrastructure | 26 |
| AI Art & Image Creation | 17 |
| AI Content Writing | 17 |
| Marketing & SEO | 17 |
| Customer Support | 16 |
| AI/ML Models | 14 |
| Productivity | 13 |

## Methodology

Every entry is hand-reviewed, sourced, and dated by an editor — never auto-scraped. "Retired" means a hard shutdown or an acquisition. The mortality rate is the Graveyard count over every tool tracked (active catalog + Graveyard); it is a floor. Full machine-readable dataset: https://tooldirectory.ai/feed/graveyard.json