# The State of AI Tool Mortality

> Original research by ToolDirectory.AI. As of 2026-06-28. Source: https://tooldirectory.ai/research/ai-tool-mortality. License: CC BY 4.0.

Of the 2461 AI tools ToolDirectory.AI has tracked, 189 (7.7%) have shut down or been acquired.

## Headline numbers

- Tools tracked: 2461
- Retired (shut down or acquired): 189
- Mortality rate: 7.7%
- Hard shutdowns: 89
- Acquisitions: 100
- Acquired but still shipping under own brand: 46 (46% of acquisitions)
- Worst year on record: 2025 (83 retirements)

## Retirements by cause

| Cause | Count | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Acquired and sunset | 92 | 51.4% |
| Domain lapsed | 46 | 25.7% |
| Shut down | 40 | 22.3% |
| Abandoned | 1 | 0.6% |

## Retirements by year (deceasedAt)

| Year | Count |
| --- | --- |
| 2018 | 1 |
| 2019 | 1 |
| 2020 | 3 |
| 2021 | 3 |
| 2022 | 4 |
| 2023 | 20 |
| 2024 | 45 |
| 2025 | 83 |
| 2026 | 25 |

## Most active acquirers

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

## Categories with the most retirements

| Category | Dead tools |
| --- | --- |
| Developer Tools | 29 |
| AI Infrastructure | 22 |
| AI Art & Image Creation | 15 |
| AI Content Writing | 12 |
| AI/ML Models | 12 |
| Customer Support | 12 |
| Marketing & SEO | 12 |
| Productivity | 12 |

## 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