Amazon announced Tuesday it will shutter Mechanical Turk, the 21-year-old crowdsourced labor market platform founder Jeff Bezos once called “artificial artificial intelligence.”

The rising use of AI could have delivered the fatal blow.

The Seattle-based e-commerce giant launched Mechanical Turk, which users commonly call MTurk, in 2005. The platform allowed gig workers complete simple digital tasks that were for years easy for humans but challenging for computers. People looking for side jobs could transcribe audio, staking surveys or label images for a few cents per task.

But AI has become more capable of such mundane tasks in recent years — and some of those workers caught on. A 2023 study by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne found that between 33% and 46% of workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk used large language models like ChatGPT to complete some of those tasks.

At the top of Mechanical Turk’s website, a banner now reads that the platform will shut down Sept. 30. The closure also affects SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI — similar platforms that have humans help train or check AI.

“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” Amazon’s banner reads.

Amazon originally developed the platform to solve its own problems, according to a 2007 New York Times article. Amazon wanted to wipe out duplicates from its enormous library of product pages, and it was easier to hire humans for that work rather than develop a software program, Bezos said at the time.

Bezos said he figured other companies would find the service useful as well, and Mechanical Turk was born.

Amazon named the platform after an 18th-century hoax that tricked people into thinking they were playing chess against a wooden mannequin operated by a machine, when in reality a hidden chess master secretly controlled the mannequin’s arm.

The work, which frequent users call “turking,” can be extremely low paying. One New York Times writer in 2019 wrote he made just $7.83 after turking for eight hours, or just under $1 an hour. The writer said disturbing photos, such as a beheading, occasionally shown when turkers labeled photographs to train an AI program.

In a 2016 Pew Research Center survey of nearly 3,000 U.S. turkers, about half made less than $5 an hour and a quarter said they earned all or most of their income from turking.

Still, the platform had no shortage of workers. In 2026 documents, Amazon boasted that the platform had 500,000 workers across 190 countries.

Those turkers will need to find alternative work when the platform shuts down next month. But they’ll be entering into an era of AI training gig work that pays significantly better — as long as they have some specialized skills.

Although AI advancement has eliminated some of the simple digital tasks Mechanical Turk offers, it’s simultaneously created a much larger market for gig workers to evaluate AI.

The work can pay between minimum wage and a few hundred dollars an hour depending on someone’s expertise. However, the tasks are generally harder than identifying images or transcribing audio. The high-paying ones can require specialized skills, like speaking a certain language or working in a certain industry.

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