What happened to Air AI?
The Federal Trade Commission sued Air AI and its owners on 25 August 2025, alleging they sold AI calling software and coaching to small businesses with false earnings claims and a refund guarantee they did not honour, taking 'roughly $19 million' since at least February 2023. On 24 March 2026 the FTC announced a settlement: an $18 million judgment, 'largely suspended' because the defendants cannot pay, with $50,000 paid, and a ban on selling business opportunities.
The product is gone. On 30 October 2026, air.ai serves 'Air | Enterprise Readiness', a defence software company that describes itself as 'Air, formerly Govini'. Its /pricing path returns 404. Nothing on the domain mentions the voice product, and Air AI has published no shutdown notice.
What Air AI sold
Air AI marketed a conversational AI that could hold phone calls on a business's behalf. Its own LinkedIn pitch, quoted on Hacker News when the case was filed, promised '10-40 minute long phone calls that sound like a REAL human' and AI that 'can do the entire job of a full time agent'. One of its marketing graphics, reproduced in the complaint, claimed it 'Costs $115,000 to replace 1 sales rep'.
What buyers actually paid for, per the complaint, were two packages: the 'Air AI Access Card', software plus coaching, at $15,000 to $30,000, and 'Licensing', a business opportunity to resell the AI, at $25,000 and up to $100,000. The complaint says prices 'usually exceed $10,000' and that the defendants 'appear to set the price depending on a consumers' ability to pay'.
The case in dates and figures
| Date | Event | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| February 2023 | Conduct begins, per the complaint | At least 30 months before the suit | Complaint ¶2 |
| August 2024 | Owner emails customers: 'We are completely out of cash' | Refunds outstanding | Complaint ¶86 |
| 25 August 2025 | FTC files suit in the District of Arizona | Roughly $19 million taken; losses up to $250,000 each | Complaint; FTC press release |
| 5 February 2026 | Joint motion to stay for settlement | Docket 41, per the FTC's settlement motion | |
| 24 March 2026 | Proposed stipulated order filed; Commission vote 2-0 | $18 million judgment, $50,000 paid | FTC press release |
| 30 October 2026 | air.ai serves Air, formerly Govini | /pricing returns 404 | Checked directly |
The settlement recovers $50,000 of an $18 million judgment, 0.28%, and about 0.26% of the roughly $19 million the complaint says was taken. The proposed order came 211 days after the complaint, and the recovery reflects what defendants who say they are out of money can pay.
What the complaint says the product did
The complaint's account of the software is blunter than any review. 'For some Air AI Access Card holders, the conversational AI technology was never available, even though Defendants promised to give these consumers "first notice" upon releasing the feature.' Where it was available, the complaint says it was 'faulty, often not able to perform basic' tasks, 'like placing outbound calls to businesses, scheduling appointments, taking down email addresses, or responding accurately to questions'. Getting it to work at all, the complaint says, required buyers to 'pre-script answers for every potential question'.
A Hacker News commenter flagged a different risk in February 2024, when the FCC ruled that AI-generated voices count as artificial voices under robocall law. The commenter, who ran an inbound voice company, wrote that the ruling 'basically killed outbound AI calling companies like Air.ai'. That is one practitioner's opinion, not a finding, and the FTC's case does not rest on it. The FTC's case is about what Air AI told buyers.
The refund guarantee, as written and as paid
The guarantee was the sales argument. The complaint quotes the Access Card contract clause titled 'THE AIR AI GUARANTEE & EXPECTATIONS': within 6 months, the 'Starting Term', the client will have generated 'revenue equal to double or more of the initial cost'; if not, the client can cancel and be 'refunded the full amount'. Separately, 'Client may receive an unconditional refund within 72 hours of purchase for any reason.' Licensing contracts offered a full 'buy back' for any reason, 'but no sooner than 120 days after signing'.
| Promise | Window | What the complaint says happened |
|---|---|---|
| Unconditional refund | 72 hours | At least one buyer who tried to cancel inside 72 hours was talked out of it by pointing to the longer guarantee (¶83) |
| Refund if revenue is under 2× cost | 6 months | Buyers were strung along 'for months' (¶84); some lost access to the service on asking (¶85) |
| Licensing buy-back | Not before 120 days | Some contracts tied it to conditions such as a set number of calls (¶81) |
| Overall | 'Defendants' blanket refund guarantee is usually false' (¶84) |
The structure is the lesson. A 72-hour unconditional window is too short to test a calling product; a 6-month performance window is long enough for the seller's position to change. The August 2024 email quoted in the complaint shows that it did: 'We have spent 100% of our cash, maxed out our credit, and even given up our apartment to cut back.' The complaint says the defendants kept selling Licensing after sending it.
The earnings claims
The FTC charged violations of the FTC Act, the Telemarketing Sales Rule and the Business Opportunity Rule. The earnings claims are why the last applies. According to the complaint, buyers were told they could quickly make back $15,000 to $30,000, that they would get a full refund if they did not make back a $30,000 investment within three months, that one licence holder generated $450,000 in revenue in 30 days, and that a licence could pay '$1MM every single month'.
A business opportunity sold on earnings claims needs a disclosure document and substantiation under the rule. The settlement bans Air AI and its owners from selling or marketing any business opportunity and from making earnings claims 'without adequate substantiation or disclosure'.
The other AI tools that changed hands or stopped selling
Air AI is the only one here with a fraud case. The others are ordinary endings, acquisitions, renames and withdrawn price pages, and they matter to a buyer for the same reason: a tool you are evaluating may not be the company it was a year ago. Every domain below was checked on 30 October 2026.
| Tool | What happened | When | What its domain does now | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Air AI | FTC suit and settlement | Aug 2025 to Mar 2026 | air.ai serves Air, formerly Govini; /pricing 404 | FTC |
| PlayAI (formerly PlayHT) | Acquired by Meta; team joined Meta | July 2025 | play.ai and play.ht on Facebook name servers with no web address; playht.com parked | TechCrunch, 13 July 2025 |
| Clari | Merged with Salesloft | Announced August 2025 | clari.com redirects to salesloft.com | MarTech, 8 August 2025 |
| Drift | Absorbed into Salesloft | 2024 | drift.com redirects through four hops to Salesloft's chat agents page | Existing record |
| Clearbit | Acquired by HubSpot | Closed December 2023 | clearbit.com says 'Clearbit has joined HubSpot'; /pricing redirects home | HubSpot 10-K |
| Groq | Non-exclusive licence to Nvidia; founder joined Nvidia | December 2025 | groq.com/pricing redirects to the homepage; GroqCloud 'will continue to operate' | Groq press release, 24 December 2025 |
| Outreach | Moved domain | Not established | outreach.io redirects to outreach.ai | Checked directly |
| Sieve | Left the category | Not established | sievedata.com redirects to sieve.ai, a 'multimodal data lab'; /pricing 404 | Checked directly |
How long these endings take to show
The gap between something changing and a buyer being able to see it is long. Air AI's owner told customers the company was out of cash in August 2024; the FTC filed 12 months later and settled 7 months after that. In total, roughly 20 months passed between that email and a public settlement, during which the complaint says sales continued.
Acquisitions are faster and quieter. PlayAI's team joined Meta, per TechCrunch's July 2025 report, and its domains stopped resolving rather than announcing anything. Clari's domain now lands on Salesloft's homepage with no notice on the landing page. Groq removed its public pricing page while saying in its own release that its cloud service continues 'without interruption'. In each case the signal was a changed redirect or a missing price page, not an announcement on the product's site.
How to check an AI vendor before you pay
- Follow the domain:
curl -sIL https://vendor.com/pricing. A redirect to a different company, or a pricing page that 404s while the homepage loads, is the most common sign of an ending. - Read the guarantee's windows, not its headline. A 72-hour unconditional refund and a 6-month performance test are two different products; ask which one applies if the software does not work in week three.
- Ask whether the price is published. The complaint says Air AI's prices varied by what each buyer could pay. A vendor without a public price can charge you differently from the next buyer.
- Test the exact capability you are buying before paying: outbound calls, booking, data capture. The complaint says some buyers never got the feature they paid for.
- Be wary of vendor-arranged financing and of earnings promises. The complaint says buyers were left paying off loans 'for Services they can no longer use or access'.
- Search the FTC's cases and proceedings for the company name and its owners' names before signing anything over $10,000.
Where to run these checks
The vendor checks page runs six of these checks across 264 tools in this directory, and the Air AI record keeps the domain history.
If you paid Air AI
The settlement requires the operators to pay $50,000. Against roughly $19 million taken, any refund that reaches individual buyers will be a small fraction of what they paid. The FTC runs its own refund programmes and contacts eligible consumers directly; it does not charge for refunds, so anyone asking for a fee to recover Air AI money is not the FTC.
Buyers still paying off a loan brokered for the purchase should read the loan contract separately from the Air AI contract, because the lender is a different party. The complaint describes such loans; the settlement announcement does not say whether they are affected.
Should you use an AI calling vendor after Air AI?
Yes, if it sells software rather than an income. The difference is visible before you pay: a software vendor publishes a per-minute or per-seat price, offers a trial or a short contract, and talks about what the product does. Air AI, per the complaint, sold five-figure packages priced by the buyer's means and talked about what the buyer would earn.
The voice-agent platforms in this directory that publish a rate, such as Vapi, Retell AI and Bland AI, charge by the minute and can be tested for a few dollars. That does not make them good; it makes them checkable, which is what Air AI was not.
Who writes about this
Unusually for this site's categories, the pages ranking for 'what happened to air ai' on 30 October 2026 were not vendors: the FTC itself, twice, CFO Dive, a law-firm digest, a risk newsletter, Trustpilot and two Reddit threads asking for a replacement. The facts are public; what the ranking pages lack is the complaint's own numbers and what the domain does now.
What this page does not know
This page does not know whether the court has signed the stipulated order, what conditions would lift the suspension of the $18 million judgment, or how the $50,000 will be distributed. Those are in the order itself and the court's docket, which the FTC's case page will link once final. It also does not know how many buyers received a refund before the suit, what share of the roughly $19 million was refunded, or whether the AI calling product ever worked for any customer, because the complaint describes failures and no independent test of the product was ever published. If you are a former customer, the FTC's case page and its refunds page are the sources to watch; this page will update when the order is entered.
For the other tools in the table, it does not know the closing date of the Clari and Salesloft merger, the value of Groq's licence to Nvidia, or when Outreach moved its domain. Check each vendor's own announcement or filing before relying on a date.
So what happened to Air AI?
It ran out of money, was sued by the FTC for taking roughly $19 million on false earnings claims and refunds it did not pay, and settled for an $18 million judgment of which $50,000 is paid. Its owners are banned from selling business opportunities. The air.ai domain now belongs to a defence software company. There is no Air AI product to buy, and no successor it named.