Amazon announced it will shut down its Mechanical Turk platform on September 30, 2026, ending a 21-year run as a key tool for gig workers, researchers, and AI training.
The company stated in a notice on the platform’s website that the decision follows a regular evaluation of its programs, tools, and services. Amazon also confirmed it stopped accepting new users for the service last month.
Mechanical Turk, often abbreviated as MTurk, was launched in 2005 as an internal tool to help label product listings on Amazon’s marketplace. It later expanded into an external platform where humans performed tasks that computers struggled to complete, such as transcribing audio, labeling data, or answering surveys. The platform once included more than 500,000 workers, known as turkers, who were paid small sums per task.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos originally described MTurk as “artificial artificial intelligence” in a 2007 interview, referring to its role in outsourcing tasks to humans when automation was insufficient. Over time, the platform became a staple for researchers collecting survey data and for gig workers seeking flexible income.
Decline and AI’s Role
The closure comes as artificial intelligence has advanced to handle many tasks MTurk was designed for. A 2023 study estimated that 33% to 46% of MTurk workers used large-language models to complete tasks on the platform, reflecting a shift in how data is processed.
Amazon had also marketed MTurk as a data annotation source for its SageMaker AI service, positioning it as a workforce for training machine learning models. However, competitors like Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have since entered the market, offering similar gig-based data labeling services.
Worker Impact
Labor advocates noted that MTurk’s decline had already affected workers. Krista Pawloski, an organizer with Turkopticon, an employee advocacy group, described the platform as being “in decline” in recent years. While MTurk provided flexible work opportunities, critics highlighted the low pay and lack of traditional employment benefits.
The shutdown will mark the end of a platform that bridged human labor and early AI development, leaving gig workers and researchers to adapt to new alternatives.