Amazon Web Services (AWS) may be set to wind down its Mechanical Turk (MTurk) offering.

Named in homage to the purported chess-playing automaton from the 1700s, MTurk is a crowdsourcing marketplace that allows AWS users to outsource work that couldn’t necessarily be automated. Workers would be able to complete simple, repetitive tasks like taking quick surveys or identifying objects in photos.

A notice on the service’s website states that AWS will no longer be open to new customers effective July 30, 2026. Existing customers can still use the service as normal.

Such an announcement is usually an omen of shutdown for such a service, with the hyperscaler confirming it does plan to invest in “security and availability improvements” for Mechanical Turk, but has no plans for new features.

MTurk was launched in 2005, predating Amazon’s cloud business by almost a year.

The service was aptly named given the original Mechanical Turk, which is believed to have beaten both Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin, was in fact being controlled by a human chess master hidden just underneath the so-called machine.

Amazon’s remote crowdsourced human labor offering, meanwhile, was positioned as a more cost-effective alternative to hiring temporary workforces. Distributed workers would be able to perform tasks on a pay-per-task model. Amid the proliferation of AI, it found use as a means to collect and annotate data required for training models.

Amazon provided no exact reasoning for why MTurk was ceasing to accept new customers, but it may be that AI proved to be the largest nail in the service’s coffin. The increased deployments of AI agents mean microtasks that may have been previously human-managed are now being handled by agents.

A Gartner report published last week suggests agentic AI is already upending the enterprise software space, potentially nabbing $234 billion in allocation that would previously have been used toward software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor spending.

The MLTurk Reddit page, however, reacted dourly to the news, with users suggesting it had been a “long time coming.”

“MTurk practically died for workers years ago,” one user wrote. “Even researchers don't have much use for MTurk given all the bots and fraud all over the platform. Both workers and researchers have much better platforms like Prolific and Cloud Connect.”