Amazon service Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence' is shutting down

Amazon is soon pulling the plug on its 21-year-old crowdsourced work platform, called Mechanical Turk, the company said Tuesday.

"We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments," a notice posted to the Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, website said. "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026."

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk matches legions of workers with simple digital jobs, or "Human Intelligence Tasks," that typically pay out a few cents per task. They include labeling data, transcribing audio or video or answering surveys.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos described the service as "artificial artificial intelligence," as it farmed out tasks that could be easily completed by humans but proved too challenging for computers.

The service got its name from the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th century chess-playing robot that was actually controlled by a human chess master. Amazon originally conceived of the idea to assist with labeling reams of data on its sprawling webstore, The New York Times reported.