Amazon to shut down Mechanical Turk after 21 years

Amazon Amazon.com, Inc. ↘ 0.35% announced Tuesday that it will permanently close Mechanical Turk, its pioneering crowdsourced labor platform, effective September 30, 2026. The decision ends a two-decade experiment in what founder Jeff Bezos once called "artificial artificial intelligence" — farming out simple digital tasks to human workers that computers could not reliably perform.

A Quiet End to a Pioneering Platform

"We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments," a notice posted to the MTurk website stated. "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026."cnbc+1

Launched in 2005, MTurk connected companies with hundreds of thousands of workers who completed "Human Intelligence Tasks" — data labeling, audio transcription, survey responses — typically paying just a few cents per task. The platform at one point served more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon.cnbc

The service drew its name from an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that was secretly operated by a human chess master hidden inside. Amazon originally conceived the idea to assist with labeling data on its retail platform.cnbc

Overtaken by AI and Competition

The closure reflects how rapidly the landscape has shifted since MTurk's early days. AI models can now handle many of the simple tasks that once required human labor, while startups such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have built competing platforms to recruit data workers for model training.cnbc

Krista Pawloski, an organizer with Turkopticon, a data worker advocacy group, said Amazon appeared to invest fewer resources into improving MTurk even as competitors proliferated, causing many workers to migrate to other platforms. Questions about data quality also emerged: a 2023 study found that up to 46% of MTurk workers used AI models to complete tasks.cnbc

Last month, Amazon stopped accepting new MTurk customers — a move many workers interpreted as a signal the shutdown was imminent.moomoo+1

Workers Face Uncertain Future

For some, the platform provided essential income. Pawloski began turking in 2008 while on maternity leave and later relied on it full-time after losing her job in 2012. She noted that some insurance and travel companies still depend on MTurk and are now scrambling to find alternatives.cnbc

"There's some people that still pretty much still do it full time," Pawloski told CNBC. "They're concerned now."cnbc