Get in, loser, we're going judging. Honestly, compiling the biggest losers for Engadget is more fun than talking up the winners . While we reviewed nothing as atrocious as those ill-fated AI assistant gadgets from 2024, AI companies and services straddled both the winner and loser podiums. The losers might be you, the American consumer. In the US, anyone wanting a drone will have to find something that isn't made by DJI.

The companies, products and trends that had an absolutely awful year. It's the end of another year, so it's time for the Engadget staff to compile a list of the year's biggest losers . We scour over articles from the previous 12 months to determine the people, companies, products and trends that made our lives worse over the course of the year. Some selections may be so pervasive they actually make our list of biggest winners. In 2025, OpenAI shed any pretense it was committed to anything more than making money. There are a few different things you could point to, including the company's successful reorganization into a more traditional profit-seeking business, but I think the most damning sign was OpenAI's response to the tragic death of Adam Raine . In August, Raine's parents sued OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT was aware of four suicide attempts by their son before it helped him successfully plan his death.

The tricky thing about naming the year's biggest losers in tech is that in 2024, it once again felt like everyone lost. Amid the depressing spiral that is social media, the will-they-or-won't-they dance of banning TikTok in the US and the neverending edited and deepfaked content that has everyone questioning what's real, the world lost. But a few areas this year stood out as particularly troubling. Specifically, AI and dedicated AI gadgets proliferated more than ever, spreading not only to our digital assistants and search engines but to our wearables as well. We also saw more deterioration in Intel's standing and bid farewell to a robot maker, as well as Lightning cables.