{"slug": "amazon-will-shut-down-mechanical-turk-on-september-30", "title": "Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30", "summary": "Amazon will permanently close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending a 21-year run for the crowdsourcing service that connected more than 500,000 paid human workers with businesses needing small tasks. The platform, launched in 2005 and once described by Jeff Bezos as 'artificial artificial intelligence,' supplied human judgment for tasks like image tagging and data annotation for Amazon's SageMaker machine-learning service. Its closure comes as AI systems automate some of the same jobs, and competitors like Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have emerged for data labeling and evaluation.", "body_md": "[Business](/business/)\n\n• 3 min read\n\n# Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30\n\nAmazon is closing Mechanical Turk after 21 years, ending a platform that connected businesses with more than 500,000 paid human workers.\n\nImage: [TechRadar](https://www.techradar.com/pro/aws-is-shutting-down-mechanical-turk-which-let-humans-beat-ai-at-certain-work-tasks)\n\nAmazon will permanently close **Mechanical Turk** on **September 30, 2026**, ending a 21-year run for the crowdsourcing service that once connected more than **500,000 workers** with businesses needing small tasks completed by humans.\n\nThe platform let companies break work into “human intelligence tasks,” or HITs, that software struggled to handle reliably. Workers, commonly called “turkers,” performed image tagging, audio transcription, surveys and other routine assignments, often for only a few cents per task. Amazon launched Mechanical Turk in 2005, initially using it to help label the large volume of product data in its retail catalog.\n\nA notice on the Mechanical Turk website said:\n\n“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments.” “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.”\n\nThe name refers to an 18th-century automaton that appeared to play chess but was secretly operated by a human. Jeff Bezos described Amazon’s service as “artificial artificial intelligence,” a phrase that captured its original role: supplying human judgment where early computer systems fell short.\n\n## Mechanical Turk became part of the AI data pipeline\n\nAmazon later positioned the workforce as a source of data annotation for its **SageMaker** machine-learning service. Mechanical Turk was used in model development, even though the work remained distributed across thousands of low-paid individual assignments.\n\nThe service’s decline now coincides with the expansion of AI systems that can automate some of the same jobs. Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific have emerged as newer providers recruiting workers for data labeling and evaluation across newer AI models. Mechanical Turk’s closure doesn’t mean human review has disappeared from AI development; it removes one of the longest-running general-purpose marketplaces used to obtain it.\n\nA 2023 study by researchers in Switzerland found that **46% of surveyed Mechanical Turk workers had used AI systems while completing assigned jobs**. Workers were increasingly using the tools that companies were paying them to evaluate, label or replace.\n\n## Workers and customers have limited time to switch\n\nAmazon stopped accepting new customers before announcing the shutdown, a move that signaled the service was already being wound down. Some companies in the insurance and travel industries still rely on Mechanical Turk workers and are now looking for replacement services. The available reporting does not identify Amazon’s replacement product, migration support or any transition deadline for existing customers beyond the September 30 closure date.\n\nThe effect on workers is also uneven. Mechanical Turk was not necessarily a full-time job for most participants, but some people depended on it for regular income. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, said:\n\n“There’s some people that still pretty much still do it full time,” “They’re concerned now.”\n\nPawloski said the platform had been declining for several years as Amazon appeared to invest less in its maintenance while competitors built services aimed specifically at AI training and evaluation. The sources do not provide current worker counts, task volumes, average pay or the financial results that led Amazon to close the service.\n\nAmazon’s spokesperson Montana MacLachlan said the company remains focused on its broader customer operations:\n\n“[Amazon is] focused on delivering the best possible experience for all our Amazon and AWS customers,”\n\nMechanical Turk’s shutdown closes a service created to compensate for the limits of software at a time when humans could solve many visual, linguistic and judgment-based tasks more reliably. Its users now face a narrower question than whether AI can outperform people in the abstract: which replacement service can provide enough human input, at comparable cost, before Amazon’s September 30 cutoff.\n\n## Frequently asked questions\n\n## When will Amazon Mechanical Turk shut down?+\n\nAmazon plans to permanently close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026.\n\n## What happens to Mechanical Turk workers?+\n\nWorkers will lose access to the platform when it closes. Some people still use it full time, and affected workers are concerned about finding alternatives.\n\n## Is Amazon offering a replacement for Mechanical Turk?+\n\nThe supplied reporting does not identify a replacement product or migration program. Some insurance and travel companies are seeking other services.\n\n[Marcus Vance](/authors/marcus-vance/)\n\nEnterprise Editor\n\nMarcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/amazon-will-shut-down-mechanical-turk-on-september-30", "canonical_source": "https://forgeeks.net/amazon-shuts-down-mechanical-turk/", "published_at": "2026-08-29 20:27:53+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-29 20:48:34.709031+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Amazon", "Mechanical Turk", "Jeff Bezos", "SageMaker", "Scale AI", "Mercor", "Prolific", "Krista Pawloski"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/amazon-will-shut-down-mechanical-turk-on-september-30", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/amazon-will-shut-down-mechanical-turk-on-september-30.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/amazon-will-shut-down-mechanical-turk-on-september-30.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/amazon-will-shut-down-mechanical-turk-on-september-30.jsonld"}}