We have catalogued 2,718 AI tools. 258 have since shut down or been acquired — a hand-reviewed measure of how fast this landscape turns over.
Of the 2,718 AI tools ToolDirectory.AI has tracked, 258 (9.5%) have shut down or been acquired.
125 tools shut down outright; 133 were acquired.
2025 was the deadliest year on record, with 101 retirements.
54.1% of acquired AI tools kept shipping under their own brand; the rest were folded in and sunset.
96 distinct companies have acquired at least one tracked AI tool.
The category with the most retirements is Developer Tools (34 dead tools).
The highest failure rate is in Automotive: 16.1% of tracked tools (5/31) have died.
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.
Absolute retirements per category. Larger categories naturally bury more.
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.
“Commonly cited AI startup failure figures run 80–90% — but they're estimates. Ours is measured at the product level: 9.5%, hand-verified, and updated as the Graveyard grows.”
ToolDirectory.AI, "The State of AI Tool Mortality," August 12, 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.
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.
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