Relay, a five-year-old AI workflow automation tool positioned as an alternative to Zapier, shut down entirely on Monday. It let users automate email and task workflows with AI agents, but as OpenAI, Google, and other large platforms built similar automation into their own products, Relay lost its reason to exist as a standalone tool. Relay is one version of the story playing out now, and plenty of AI bets also die inside companies: according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents, for reasons including insufficient funding, technical challenges, competition, scaling difficulties, and weak user demand.

Even the biggest players have casualties. OpenAI rolled back a July ChatGPT redesign into a “super app” with Chat, Codex, and Work modes after users found it confusing and cluttered. It also discontinued ChatGPT Atlas, a standalone AI-powered web browser that lasted less than a year, absorbed features into ChatGPT, folded the Operator agent into the main app, integrated image generation into ChatGPT in ways that reduced DALL-E’s separate role, and shut down Sora in March 2026 after high operating costs and user-retention problems.

Apple’s improved Siri, a headline Apple Intelligence feature when announced in 2024, was delayed repeatedly because of engineering issues and bugs; the delays contributed to a $250 million settlement over how Apple marketed iPhone 16 AI capabilities. The new Siri appeared in the iOS 27 beta in July and is rolling out first to English-language users this month. Microsoft’s Recall, announced at Build 2024 as a “photographic memory” that screenshots PC activity, faced immediate privacy and security backlash over potentially capturing passwords, private messages, and financial details. It was delayed nearly a year for a redesign, but a researcher recently built a tool to extract and display captured data, reviving doubts.

Notion Mail, an AI-focused email product launched in April 2025, is scheduled to shut down on September 22 because users were turning to separate AI agents for inbox automation. Humane’s AI Pin, a $230 million-backed wearable with performance problems and a charging-case fire risk, saw its business shut down in February 2025, with HP acquiring most assets for $116 million. Rabbit R1, which sold 100,000 units after CES 2024 but was reviewed as unfinished and unreliable, is still being updated as an agentic computer controller, and Rabbit announced a portable “Project Cyberdeck” device for vibe-coding. Huxe, an AI audio app from former NotebookLM developers, shut down in May 2026 as platforms like Spotify expanded similar podcast-style audio features. Yupp, a free playground comparing more than 800 models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic and paying users crypto for votes, shut down in March 2026 because its founders never found product-market fit. Figgs AI, a customizable AI character platform with over 1 million users from 2023 to 2024, shut down because keeping the service free became too expensive. The article frames this list less as a scorecard of flops and more as a record of what these attempts can teach the industry.