When AI tools change their name: an index problem
Renaming is routine in this market and it quietly corrupts catalogs. OpenClaw previously shipped as Clawdbot and then Moltbot, and Google's Nano Banana began as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image in August 2025 before Nano Banana 2 arrived on 26 February 2026. Matching on names instead of identities duplicates rows and inflates totals.
By the The AI Tools Index team
An index is a set of claims about identity: that this row and that row are different things, and that this row today is the same thing it was last month. AI products break both claims more often than any category a catalog has had to handle before.
How often does this actually happen?
Often enough that it is a routine maintenance case rather than an exception. The open-source project now called OpenClaw previously carried the names Clawdbot and Moltbot. Google's widely used image model shipped as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image in August 2025, became known publicly by the nickname Nano Banana, and was joined by Nano Banana 2 on 26 February 2026.
Neither of those is unusual. They are simply the cases where the renaming is documented well enough to cite.
Why does renaming corrupt a catalog?
- Duplication: the old name and the new name become two rows, and the total goes up without a new product existing.
- Split history: votes, dates, and corrections attached to the old row do not follow the product.
- Broken search: readers type the name they remember and find the abandoned entry.
- Inflated category counts, which then no longer describe the market they claim to describe.
There is a harder version: the product changes shape
A rename is easy compared with a product that moves categories. Anthropic's Claude Cowork went from a desktop debut in January 2026 to web and mobile on 7 July 2026, and Google's Antigravity became a standalone application rather than only a development environment. Neither is a rename, and both change which category a catalog should file the product under.
That is why the filing rule here is the surface a person opens the product to use. It is the only rule that produces a defensible answer when a product grows a new surface.
How this index handles it
One product, one row, for the life of the product. A rename edits the row and keeps its history. A change of surface can move the row between categories, and when it does, the category counts change while the total does not. A relaunch under a new brand by the same team, with the old product retired, retires the old row rather than running both.
The result is a total that reflects how many distinct products exist in this catalog, which is the only claim a count like that can honestly make.
What a reader can do about it
When a tool you remember seems to have vanished, search for the company rather than the product, and check whether it was renamed before assuming it closed. The distinction matters: a renamed product keeps your account and your data, and a closed one does not.