Amazon Web Services (AWS) has placed Amazon Mechanical Turk under "Services in Maintenance," closing the platform to new customers effective July 30, 2026, while existing users retain access with no new features. Launched in 2005 and named after an 18th-century fake chess-playing automaton, the platform utilized a vast, decentralized workforce to perform discrete digital tasks. The decision stems from the rapid evolution of Generative AI over the past three years, as tasks like summarizing text, filtering toxic speech, or categorizing product attributes can now be executed by large language models via API calls. At its peak, hundreds of thousands of global workers relied on MTurk micro-tasks for supplemental income.