Amazon has announced it will shut down its crowdsourcing marketplace, Mechanical Turk, after more than two decades of operation. The company revealed the decision on Tuesday, with the platform set to officially close its doors on September 30, 2026.

According to a notice posted on the Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website, the move comes as part of a routine review of its offerings. The statement read: "We regularly assess our programs, services, and tools, and make adjustments based on those evaluations. Following this process, we have decided to close the AWS Mechanical Turk platform, effective September 30, 2026."

Launched in 2005, MTurk was designed to connect a large pool of part-time workers with simple online tasks, known as "human intelligence tasks." These assignments typically paid only a few cents per job and included activities such as data labeling, audio and video transcription, and survey completion.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once described the service as a form of "artificial artificial intelligence." The concept involved outsourcing tasks that computers found challenging but humans could handle with ease. The platform's name was inspired by the "Mechanical Turk," an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that was secretly operated by a human chess master.

Initially, Amazon developed the platform to help label the vast amounts of data generated by its massive e-commerce operations. At its peak, MTurk boasted over 500,000 registered workers, who were commonly referred to as "Turkers."

However, the platform has seen a steady decline in recent years. Krista Pawlowski, an activist and staff member at Turkopticon, a worker advocacy group, noted that MTurk had been "fading" for some time. The downturn comes as AI models have advanced rapidly since MTurk's inception, and a wave of data startups, including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific, have entered the market to recruit workers for AI model training.