My lost tag is (presumably) attached to my keys at the bottom of a lake. I refuse to delete it from findmy.
But, it was attached to the handles with one of these: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B34Y5YZS
There are people who dive down and find lost stuff on the bottom of lakes, and people who go magnet fishing, they still might find your keys!
I went back to my Apple Store and explained the problem. After demonstrating that a reset didn’t fix the problem, they gave me a new AirTag and kept the old one.
When I paired the new AirTag, the old one suddenly reappeared in my list! It spent some three weeks at the Apple Store, then about two weeks in Poland and now it’s been in a Dutch warehouse for about three months - last seen 17 hours ago.
I don’t know why it’s spending so much time in a Dutch warehouse - perhaps it’s Apples junkyard in Europe.
One of the AirTags actually flew around internationally for a week or so (London, Amsterdam, back to the US a few times!) but sadly after about a week there were no more updates.
Someone must have found the AirTag in whatever baggage container it was stuck in and removed the battery.
I still have the AirTag in FindMy, one day I suppose I'll delete it but I sometimes wonder what happened to it.
Did the person who found it just throw it out? Do recovered AirTags go back to Apple to be recycled and resold? Does the CEO of American Airlines, Robert Isom, have a scrooge-mc-duck-esque pool of lost AirPods he swims around in? Sometimes I wonder.