The E‑Waste of Abandoned Models: What Happens to Obsolete AI Systems and Their Prompt Histories?

You used an AI chatbot two years ago. It was helpful, quirky, a little unpredictable. Then the company shut it down. You never thought about it again. But your prompts, your conversations, your data they're still somewhere. On a server. In a backup. In a forgotten archive. The model is dead. Your data may not be. This is the e‑waste of abandoned models: the hidden afterlife of obsolete AI systems and the prompt histories they carry. When a model is decommissioned, what happens to its weights? Wh