Amazon is shutting down a go-to option for gig workers. It's the latest casualty of AI growth.

Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, its crowdsourced gig-work platform, on September 30, according to a message posted on the platform's website on Tuesday. The company said it regularly evaluates its programs and makes adjustments; last month it stopped accepting new users. The platform, launched in 2005, had more than 500,000 workers at its peak, but AI has taken over many tasks it was designed for, with a 2023 study estimating that 33% to 46% of MTurk workers used large-language models to complete tasks.

Amazon is closing a platform that became a staple for some gig workers. https://www.businessinsider.com/data-worker-side-gig-freelance-training-reviewing-ads-2025 The company will shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, according to a message https://www.mturk.com/help posted on the crowdsourced work platform's website on Tuesday. "We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments," the message reads. Last month, Amazon stopped accepting new users for the service. Amazon started Mechanical Turk — called "MTurk" by frequent users — in 2005. The company initially designed the tool to cut duplicate product listings as it sold a wider range of items, The New York Times reported https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/15/nyregion/amazon-mechanical-turk.html in 2019. Mechanical Turk eventually became an external tool as well to pay humans to do tasks that computers could not, such as transcribe audio recordings. MTurk also became a favorite among researchers who needed survey data, as well as at least one presidential campaign https://www.businessinsider.com/pete-buttigieg-campaign-amazon-mechanical-turk-gig-workers-2020-1 . Mechanical Turk became popular with gig workers, who were paid as little as a few cents per task but had more flexibility to work where and when they wanted compared to a traditional job. The platform included more than 500,000 workers at its peak. Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos called the service "artificial artificial intelligence" in a 2007 article https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/business/yourmoney/25Stream.html?smid=tw-share in The New York Times. These days, real artificial intelligence has taken on many of the tasks that Mechanical Turk was designed to help with. And while Amazon touted MTurk https://www.mturk.com/ as a tool for developing machine learning, many AI training efforts now focus on real-world data sets. There's also evidence that MTurk and AI were converging: One 2023 study https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07899 estimated that between 33% and 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used large-language models to complete tasks on the platform. Gig workers are now completing similar tasks for companies that train AI, with companies like Uber https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-project-sandbox-shows-ai-training-contractors-the-door-2025-11 getting in on the action with data-labeling gigs. There's even a market for merely selling data or documents https://www.businessinsider.com/handshake-ai-pay-30k-work-documents-compliance-ownership-2026-8 to AI training companies. Do you have a story idea about gig work? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.