AI 墓地：一份未能活下来的项目和创业公司清单

Relay, an AI-powered workflow automation tool built as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely in August. The product let users automate email and task workflows using AI agents, but as OpenAI, Google, and other larger platforms built similar automation directly into their own tools, five-year-old Relay struggled to hold on to a reason to exist as a stand-alone product. More recently, chatbot platform Character.ai filed for bankruptcy just five years after launching. Aside from Character.ai and Relay, plenty of AI bets never even survive inside the companies that build them. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence , about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents. The reasons vary: insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, difficulty scaling, or just weak user demand. The result is a growing AI graveyard. Below is a look at some of the most notable AI products, startups, launches, and bets that have shut down, pivoted, or significantly missed expectations. Think of it less as a scorecard of flops than as a record of what these attempts can (hopefully) teach the rest of the industry. Even the biggest players aren’t immune. OpenAI, one of the most valuable private companies in the world, has had its own share of casualties and missteps. One of the more recent examples was its attempt to turn ChatGPT into a broader “ super app .” On July 9, OpenAI updated the app to combine several experiences, including separate “Chat,” “Codex,” and “Work” modes, while renaming the traditional, familiar version “ChatGPT Classic.” The redesign quickly drew criticism from users who found the new interface confusing and cluttered, and OpenAI rolled back the change soon after , bringing the familiar ChatGPT interface back. That wasn’t OpenAI’s only attempt to pull everything under one roof. The company has also shut down several stand-alone apps and folded their features directly into ChatGPT — a strategy that’s worked out better than the redesign did. ChatGPT Atlas, a stand-alone AI-powered web browser, lasted less than a year before being discontinued on August 9, with its most useful features absorbed into ChatGPT. The company did the same thing with Operator , an AI agent that could browse the web and complete tasks on a user’s behalf, and OpenAI has increasingly built image generation directly into ChatGPT, shrinking the role of DALL-E as its own separate destination for creating images. We also can’t forget its video-sharing platform, Sora , which struggled with high operating costs and user-retention challenges and shut down in March 2026. When Apple unveiled Apple Intelligence in 2024, an improved Siri was one of the highlighted features. The pitch promised a Siri that could understand context, know what was happening across apps, and get tasks done effectively. However, Apple repeatedly pushed back the release of the new Siri, citing various reasons like engineering issues and bugs . This delay eventually contributed to a $250 million settlement over claims regarding how Apple marketed the AI capabilities of the iPhone 16. Siri AI finally appeared in the iOS 27 beta this past July, with the new AI-powered version rolling out to English-language users first this month; support for other languages is expected to follow.