Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, closing the crowdsourced-labor marketplace it launched in 2005. The Next Web reported the announcement on August 26. Amazon's stated reason, given by spokesperson Montana MacLachlan, is procedural: "We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments."
MTurk paid people cents per task to do work software could not. Jobs were posted as Human Intelligence Tasks — image labeling, audio and video transcription, survey completion, content moderation. Amazon's own product documentation put the workforce at more than 500,000 people across 190 countries.
Three services close on the same day
The shutdown is wider than one marketplace. Tech Times reports that AWS SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI close on September 30 as well, and that requesters will receive full refunds of their remaining account balances within 30 days. Amazon stopped accepting new customers across all three in July, which is when the wind-down effectively began; the August announcement set the end date.
TechSpot notes the platform had been losing ground for years to a newer set of vendors — Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific — that recruit workers specifically for AI training and pay considerably better than cents a task.
Where the name came from
Jeff Bezos described MTurk as "artificial artificial intelligence," and the name came from an 18th-century hoax: the Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton that toured Europe beating opponents while a human player sat concealed in the cabinet below. The automaton was exhibited from 1770 as a machine that played chess on its own.
The Next Web cites a 2023 study finding that up to 46% of MTurk workers were already using AI to complete the tasks they were hired for.
Uristocrat has covered the money moving in the other direction: Wikipedia's AI training deals with Microsoft, Meta and Amazon and the $700 billion Big Tech is spending on AI this year.
Source: The Next Web
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