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.
274 of the 2,730 AI tools we have catalogued have shut down or been acquired — a 10% failure rate measured across real products, not companies. 77 retirements January 1 to August 27 this year against 65 over the same span in 2025 — +18.5% 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 August 27 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 August 27, 2026): 10% of the 2,730 AI tools we track have shut down or been acquired. On a like-for-like window (January 1 to August 27), 2026 recorded 77 retirements against 65 in 2025, a change of +18.5%. Of 145 acquisitions, 57.2% 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 August 27, 2026. 274 of the 2,730 AI tools ToolDirectory.AI tracks have shut down or been acquired — a 10% product-level failure rate. Comparing matching calendar windows (January 1 to August 27), 2026 has recorded 77 retirements against 65 in 2025, a change of +18.5%. 77 retirements January 1 to August 27 this year against 65 over the same span in 2025 — +18.5% on a like-for-like window. Tools are leaving the catalogue faster than they were a year ago.
10%, measured at the product level: 274 of 2,730 tools catalogued by ToolDirectory.AI have shut down or been acquired, as of August 27, 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: 53, 2025: 104. 2026 has recorded 77 so far (January 1 to August 27) and is still running, so it is not comparable to a finished year. The peak year on record is 2025 with 104 retirements.
Both, and the mix matters more than the total. Of the 145 acquisitions ToolDirectory.AI tracks, 83 (57.2%) 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 August 27 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 August 27, 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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