Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, its 21-year-old crowdsourced work platform, the company announced Tuesday. The service will close effective September 30, 2026, according to a notice posted on the Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website.
“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” the notice said. “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk.”
Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk connected a large pool of workers with simple digital tasks—known as “Human Intelligence Tasks”—that typically paid only a few cents each. Workers labeled data, transcribed audio or video, and answered surveys, among other assignments. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once described the platform as “artificial artificial intelligence,” because it outsourced jobs that humans could handle easily but computers found difficult.
The name came from the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that was secretly controlled by a human chess master. Amazon originally built the service to help label the vast amounts of data on its sprawling webstore, The New York Times reported.
At its peak, the platform served more than 500,000 workers, also known as turkers, according to Amazon. But in recent years, MTurk had been “in decline,” said Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, an employee advocacy group for data workers.
The rapid advance of AI models has eroded MTurk’s relevance, and a crop of data startups—including Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific—have entered the market to recruit workers for AI training. Amazon tried to position MTurk as a data annotation source for its SageMaker service, even marketing it around the clock availability. “Workers are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” one AWS webpage said, promising fast turnaround for human review and labeling jobs.
Pawloski said Amazon seemed to invest fewer resources into improving MTurk as more data labeling services emerged, prompting many turkers to shift to competing platforms. She also noted that questions have been raised about the quality of data produced on the platform. A 2023 study by academic researchers in Switzerland found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete tasks.
Last month, Amazon said it would stop accepting new Mechanical Turk customers, a move many workers interpreted as a precursor to shutdown. Some insurance and travel companies still depend on MTurk for data workers and are now scrambling to find alternative platforms, Pawloski said.
Pawloski began turking in 2008 while on maternity leave for supplemental income, later transitioning to full-time work in 2012 after losing her job to care for her son with special needs. In 2019, she started organizing with Turkopticon.
She emphasized that Mechanical Turk and similar platforms provide “meaningful income” and flexible hours—comparable to gig jobs like ride-hailing or Amazon Flex—with the benefit of being fully remote and smartphone-friendly. “There’s some people that still pretty much still do it full time,” she said. “They’re concerned now.”
Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/25/amazon-service-that-jeff-bezos-called-artificial-ai-is-shutting-down.html
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