Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk, its crowdsourced work platform also known as MTurk, on September 30, 2026, ending a service launched in 2005 that matched gig workers with low-paid digital tasks computers once struggled to perform. Amazon said on the platform’s website that it regularly evaluates programs, tools and services and makes adjustments based on those assessments, after already stopping new user sign-ups the prior month. The tool began as an internal way to clean duplicate product listings, later became an external marketplace for transcription, surveys and similar Human Intelligence Tasks, and at its peak listed more than 500,000 workers. Founder Jeff Bezos once called the model “artificial artificial intelligence.” Its decline tracks gains in real AI, a shift toward real-world training data, and competition from AI data-labeling work—including efforts involving companies such as Uber—while a 2023 study estimated that 33% to 46% of MTurk workers used large language models to complete tasks, raising questions about supposedly human-generated data.