Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourced labor marketplace that helped build the data pipeline behind modern AI, ending a 21-year run that closes on September 30.
What Amazon Announced
“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” Amazon said in a notice posted to the Mechanical Turk website. “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.” Amazon had already stopped accepting new customers on July 30, a step many workers on MTurk’s Reddit community interpreted at the time as a sign the platform’s end was near.
Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk connected businesses and researchers with people who completed small online jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, often paying just a few cents each. Tasks ranged from labeling images and transcribing audio to sorting data and answering surveys. At its peak, the marketplace served more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon.
‘Artificial Artificial Intelligence’
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gave the service its enduring nickname, calling it “artificial artificial intelligence” in a 2007 interview, a nod to how it relied on humans to perform simple tasks computers still struggled with. The platform’s own name paid homage to an 18th-century chess-playing machine that appeared to operate automatically but secretly concealed a human chess master inside, an illusion that once defeated opponents including Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.
Over time, Mechanical Turk became woven into the infrastructure of machine learning, with Amazon promoting it through AWS SageMaker as a source for collecting and annotating the large datasets used to train and validate AI models.
Overtaken by What It Helped Build
The shutdown carries a certain irony: the AI systems Mechanical Turk helped train have grown capable enough to perform many of the tasks the platform once relied on human workers to do. Newer companies including Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific have built businesses specifically around sourcing human labor to train advanced AI models, drawing workers away from MTurk in recent years.
A 2023 academic study found that between 33 and 46 percent of surveyed Mechanical Turk workers may have been using AI tools to complete their tasks, blurring the line between human and machine-generated work the platform was built to keep separate. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with the advocacy group Turkopticon, told CNBC that MTurk had been declining for years as Amazon invested fewer resources into it while competitors expanded.
Why It Matters
For some workers, the closure marks more than the retirement of an ageing Amazon service. MTurk provided flexible remote income to people who depended on tasks they could complete from home, sometimes using little more than a smartphone, and Pawloski said some still relied on the platform full time. Amazon has directed workers and businesses to an FAQ page to help them prepare for the shutdown, though it has not announced a replacement service.
