The question is usually answered with forecasts, or with company-level survey estimates that put startup failure at 80–90%. We can answer it a different way. We maintain a fixed catalogue of real AI products and check each one by hand as it lives or dies, so we can measure what actually happened to them — no modelling, no extrapolation.
303 of the 2,807 AI tools we have catalogued have shut down or been acquired — a 10.8% failure rate measured across real products, not companies. 101 retirements January 1 to September 16 this year against 75 over the same span in 2025 — +34.7% on a like-for-like window. Tools are leaving the catalogue faster than they were a year ago.
Both halves of that rate come from the same catalogue, so it holds regardless of how complete our coverage is. It describes the tools we track — not the AI market as a whole.
Counts on the right are the year's total, then its split as shut down / acquired-and-retired / acquired-and-still-shipping. 2026 is marked YTD because it is still running: it covers January 1 to September 16 and cannot be compared like-for-like against a finished year. That is what the window comparison above is for.
ToolDirectory.AI, "Is the AI Bubble Bursting?" (as of September 16, 2026): 10.8% of the 2,807 AI tools we track have shut down or been acquired. On a like-for-like window (January 1 to September 16), 2026 recorded 101 retirements against 75 in 2025, a change of +34.7%. Of 157 acquisitions, 55.4% still ship under their own brand. https://tooldirectory.ai/research/is-the-ai-bubble-bursting
Free to quote with attribution under CC BY 4.0. Figures move as the dataset grows — please cite the date alongside the number.
Not on the evidence in our catalogue, as of September 16, 2026. 303 of the 2,807 AI tools ToolDirectory.AI tracks have shut down or been acquired — a 10.8% product-level failure rate. Comparing matching calendar windows (January 1 to September 16), 2026 has recorded 101 retirements against 75 in 2025, a change of +34.7%. 101 retirements January 1 to September 16 this year against 75 over the same span in 2025 — +34.7% on a like-for-like window. Tools are leaving the catalogue faster than they were a year ago.
10.8%, measured at the product level: 303 of 2,807 tools catalogued by ToolDirectory.AI have shut down or been acquired, as of September 16, 2026. That is far below the 80–90% failure figures usually quoted in AI bubble coverage, because those are company-level estimates across the whole startup population while this is a census of real products inside a fixed catalogue.
2018: 2, 2019: 1, 2020: 4, 2021: 5, 2022: 5, 2023: 22, 2024: 56, 2025: 106. 2026 has recorded 101 so far (January 1 to September 16) and is still running, so it is not comparable to a finished year. The peak year on record is 2025 with 106 retirements.
Both, and the mix matters more than the total. Of the 157 acquisitions ToolDirectory.AI tracks, 87 (55.4%) still ship under their own brand rather than being switched off. An exit that keeps the product alive is consolidation, not collapse — which is why counting "AI tools that disappeared" without separating the two overstates the die-off.
Because the current year is incomplete, and setting a partial year beside a finished one invents a collapse that is really just the calendar. Annualising it instead invents a forecast. Every comparison on this page uses matching windows — January 1 to September 16 against the identical span a year earlier — so both sides have had the same amount of time to accumulate.
It is recomputed from the Graveyard on every rebuild, so it is current as of September 16, 2026. Every retirement is hand-reviewed, sourced and dated by an editor rather than auto-scraped, which is why the dataset can record what happened after a deal closed — a fact that post-dates any model's training cutoff.
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