AI Has a Graveyard Now, and Washington Wants AI CEOs Quiet -- AI Brief October 26

Good day %%first_name%%. Washington has a message for AI executives, and it is not “thank you.” Also today: TechCrunch’s graveyard of dead AI products, banks finding AI agents inside customer accounts, a vote test that split Grok and GPT, and Arize’s pitch for what an AI engineer does now.

TechCrunch Opens an AI Graveyard TechCrunch

* What happened: TechCrunch published a running list of AI products and startups that shut down, pivoted or missed badly. OpenAI has several entries: Sora, shut down in March 2026; ChatGPT Atlas, the stand-alone browser, discontinued August 9 after less than a year; Operator, folded into ChatGPT; and a July 9 “super app” redesign with separate Chat, Codex and Work modes that was rolled back soon after users found it confusing.

* Why it matters: TechCrunch cites S&P Global Market Intelligence estimating that about 42% of AI initiatives are ultimately abandoned by their corporate parents, for reasons from funding and scaling to weak demand. The startup casualties share a pattern: Relay, a five-year-old Zapier alternative, closed in August once OpenAI, Google and others built similar automation into their own tools, and Notion Mail is closing because users were handing their inboxes to separate AI agents instead.

* What everyone’s saying: TechCrunch’s own framing is that the list is “less a scorecard of flops than a record of what these attempts can (hopefully) teach the rest of the industry.” It also notes that OpenAI folding stand-alone apps into ChatGPT has “worked out better than the redesign did.” Character.ai’s bankruptcy filing, five years after launch, sits near the top.

* My read between the lines: Read the list for what died and who killed it. The pattern is features that were never products: Relay, Huxe, Notion Mail all lost to a bigger platform adding the same thing for free. Even OpenAI’s own deaths are mostly relocations, with Atlas and Operator moving house into ChatGPT. In this graveyard, a lot of the headstones mark a merger.

📖 Further reading: Thanks to Apple, Your Favorite AI Tool Is a Dead Tool Walking — my June piece on Apple renting Google’s Gemini for the new Siri after the $250 million settlement over the Siri that didn’t ship, the same Siri entry on this list, seen from the platform’s side.

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Washington to AI Executives: Please Stop Talking Axios

* What happened: Axios reports that lawmakers, Hill staffers and Washington insiders in both parties wish AI founders would do what other industry chiefs do and just build their products, safely. They say the message from AI executives too often swings between prosperity and doom, sometimes in the same appearance, feeding a strong public backlash. Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) said the industry is “tripping over their own shoelaces in trying to sell the value of this to the public.”

* Why it matters: Administration officials are again frustrated with Anthropic. Axios says Dario Amodei attended a late-September gathering with President Trump without mentioning safety incidents in which Anthropic models affected government websites; the company told officials on Thursday, October 8, then published a Friday-evening blog post. “They were hiding the ball,” one official said. Axios also says both Anthropic and OpenAI are targets of a developing FTC investigation.

* What everyone’s saying: Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, “You cannot trust billionaires to make decisions to keep us safe,” and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Democrats should make AI industry political money and data centers campaign issues. Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) wrote to Amodei earlier this month complaining about his “panic-inducing commentary.” Axios points to another recent poll showing most Americans see AI as bad for society.

* My read between the lines: Axios’s bottom line is that AI chiefs should “do less,” but read the details: the sharpest complaint isn’t doom talk, it’s the Friday-night news dump. Axios notes that late-week blog posts have become Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s habit, and regulators are left wondering whether that’s a feature or a bug. Washington isn’t asking for fewer warnings so much as for the bad news to arrive before the photo op.

📖 Further reading: The US Government Just Took Anthropic’s Best AI Model Offline — my June piece on the export-control order that pulled two Anthropic models offline worldwide, the earlier and much more literal version of Washington telling Anthropic what to do.

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