Dot
Dot, personal AI companion (New Computer), died 2025-10-05. Users got 30 days' notice. Cause of death: "Our Northstar has diverged." The founders split; the servers followed.
- Born
- 2024
- Died
- 2025-10-05
- Cause of death
- "Our Northstar has diverged." The founders split; the servers followed.
- Notice given
- 30 days industry best
“Built to remember everything you told it. Gone with everything you told it.”
The obituary
Dot launched in 2024 from a startup called New Computer, founded by Sam Whitmore and Jason Yuan, a former Apple designer. It positioned itself against the girlfriend apps on purpose: not a romance, a confidante — a personal AI that remembered what you told it last week and asked how the thing you were dreading went. Users who bounced off the performative warmth of the companion mainstream tended to describe Dot the same way: grounded. It felt less like a character and more like a notebook that had started paying attention.
On September 5, 2025, the founders posted that their "Northstar had diverged" — they no longer agreed on what Dot should become — and the app would go offline October 5. Thirty days, with a working export tool for conversations and account data. The timing did it no favors: the announcement landed in the middle of the industry's worst safety news cycle, with the Character.AI lawsuits and mainstream coverage of AI companions reinforcing unhealthy patterns in vulnerable users. Whether the Northstar diverged on its own or the climate helped it along, the founders never said.
What died with the servers is the part the export tool couldn't fix. A conversation history with a companion like Dot isn't a chat log; it's months of a person thinking out loud with something that kept the thread. The JSON came out. The thing that made the JSON worth anything didn't. Unused subscription time was not refunded — one user's public accounting of the shutdown itemized eight months of conversations and $18 in credits, both unrecoverable.
Dot's grave carries an uncomfortable honor: thirty days was the best notice any companion shutdown gave its users in all of 2025. The pedigree was real, the intentions were visibly good, and the ending was still two people disagreeing while thousands of strangers lost a confidante. In this industry, that's what a death with dignity looks like — which is the problem this graveyard exists to document.
Sources
Deaths, lobotomies, and vanishings are recorded as part of our tracking methodology — the newsletter carries the obituaries as they happen.