ToolDirectory.AI · ResearchLive · Updated September 20, 2026
Original research · The AI Graveyard
How many AI tools quietly die?
We have catalogued 2,807 AI tools. 303 have since shut down or been acquired — a hand-reviewed measure of how fast this landscape turns over.
By the numbers
As of September 20, 2026
Retirements by year
deceasedAt
2025 was the deadliest year on record. Counts reflect the year each tool actually wound down — recent years lag, because failures surface months after the fact.
Acquired and sunset32.4% · 70
Who is buying
Consolidation · 109 acquirers
06Cursor (Anysphere)
3 tools
The Graveyard
Where tools go to die
Absolute retirements per category. Larger categories naturally bury more.
R · I · P
40
Developer Tools
buried
R · I · P
32
AI Infrastructure
buried
R · I · P
25
AI Agents
buried
R · I · P
24
AI Content Writing
buried
R · I · P
24
Productivity
buried
R · I · P
23
Marketing & SEO
buried
R · I · P
23
Workflow Automation
buried
R · I · P
22
AI Art & Image Creation
buried
Which categories fail most
Failure rate
Share of every tool tracked in a category that has since died. Categories with fewer than 12 tracked tools are excluded so the rate is not noise.
Cite this report · Open data
“Commonly cited AI startup failure figures run 80–90% — but they're estimates. Ours is measured at the product level: 10.8%, hand-verified, and updated as the Graveyard grows.”
ToolDirectory.AI, "The State of AI Tool Mortality," September 20, 2026. https://tooldirectory.ai/research/ai-tool-mortality
This report and its underlying dataset are free to cite and reuse under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to ToolDirectory.AI.
Methodology · How we count
Every entry in the Graveyard is read, sourced, and dated by an editor before it lands — we do not auto-scrape, and we do not mark a tool dead just because its domain stops resolving. “Retired” means a hard shutdown or an acquisition; acquired tools that kept shipping under their own brand are tracked separately and are not counted as deaths in the cause and category breakdowns where noted.
The mortality rate is the Graveyard count divided by every tool we have ever tracked (active catalog plus Graveyard). It is a floor, not a ceiling: tools we never catalogued and tools that have died but we have not yet confirmed are not included. Numbers regenerate automatically as the registry grows.
Questions · FAQ
How many AI tools have shut down?
ToolDirectory.AI has tracked 2,807 AI tools; 303 (10.8%) have since shut down or been acquired. Of those, 146 were hard shutdowns and 157 were acquisitions.
What is the AI tool failure rate?
Across every tool we have catalogued, the measured failure rate is 10.8% as of September 20, 2026. This counts both outright shutdowns and acquisitions where the original brand was retired.
What is the AI startup failure rate?
Commonly cited AI startup failure figures run from 80% to 90%, but they are estimates. Our number is measured at the product level: 10.8% of the 2,807 AI tools we have tracked have already shut down or been acquired — a live, hand-verified floor for the real rate, updated as the Graveyard grows. Landscape-level survivorship over a longer window will read higher.
What kills most AI tools — shutdown or acquisition?
The most common recorded cause is "Shut down" at 38% of retirements with a known cause.
Do acquired AI tools survive?
55.4% of acquired AI tools kept shipping under their own brand after the deal; the rest were folded into the acquirer and sunset.
How is this data collected?
Every Graveyard entry is hand-reviewed, sourced, and dated by an editor — never auto-scraped. The full dataset is available as JSON at /feed/graveyard.json under CC BY 4.0.
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