Amazon to shut down Mechanical Turk after 21 years

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Amazon ends Mechanical Turk

Highlights

Amazon will close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026.
The platform launched in 2005 and once served more than 500,000 workers.
AI advances and newer data-labeling companies have reduced its role.

AWS Mechanical Turk will close on September 30, 2026, according to CNBC. The platform, launched in 2005, connected companies and researchers with workers who completed small digital tasks such as labeling images, transcribing audio, reviewing content, and answering surveys, often for payments measured in cents per task.

A platform built before modern AI

Mechanical Turk emerged when many seemingly simple tasks remained difficult to automate. Amazon originally used the system to help organize and label data from its own online marketplace before opening it to outside customers.

At its peak, the platform had more than 500,000 registered workers. It became widely used by academic researchers, technology companies, and businesses that needed large amounts of human-generated or human-reviewed data.

The model also gave rise to a distinctive category of remote gig work. Workers, often known as "turkers," could complete tasks from home and choose their schedules, making the service attractive to people seeking flexible or supplemental income.

But the market around MTurk changed sharply as artificial intelligence improved. Tasks that once required human judgment can increasingly be handled by machine-learning systems, while newer companies such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have built more specialized networks for recruiting workers to train and evaluate AI models.

Amazon had also tried to reposition Mechanical Turk as a source of human review and annotation for its SageMaker machine-learning services. Even so, workers and researchers had reported declining activity on the platform in recent years.

AI helped create the market that replaced it

Mechanical Turk occupies an unusual place in the history of artificial intelligence. It was built partly because computers were not capable of reliably performing many basic classification and recognition tasks. Two decades later, AI systems are increasingly able to perform exactly those jobs.

The transition has also raised questions about data quality. A 2023 academic study found that as many as 46% of Mechanical Turk workers surveyed may have used AI tools to complete tasks, blurring the distinction between human and machine-generated work.

Amazon stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers last month, which had already fueled expectations that the service was nearing the end of its life.

The shutdown still has practical consequences. Some insurance, travel, and research organizations continue to rely on MTurk, while workers who depend on the platform for income will need to move to competing services.

Its closure therefore reflects more than the retirement of an old Amazon product. It shows how quickly the infrastructure supporting AI development is changing, with generalized crowdsourcing giving way to more specialized human-data platforms and increasingly capable automated systems.

As we previously reported, Amazon bets on custom AI chips for consumer devices.

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