Amazon to Close 21-Year-Old Mechanical Turk Platform on Sept 30, 2026

Amazon has announced that its crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk (MTurk), which has operated for 21 years, will close on September 30, 2026. In a notice posted on the MTurk website, the company said that after an evaluation, it decided to shut down AWS Mechanical Turk. The platform, launched in 2005, distributed simple digital tasks such as data annotation, audio or video transcription, and surveys to a large pool of workers, typically paying a few cents per task. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once described it as "artificial artificial intelligence" because the platform outsourced tasks that computers find difficult but humans find easy. The platform's name derives from an 18th-century chess-playing robot operated by a human chess master.

The platform has served more than 500,000 workers. In recent years, with the rapid development of AI models and the entry of data startups such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific into the market to recruit workers to train models, MTurk has faced competition. Amazon had promoted MTurk as a data annotation service through its SageMaker offering. A 2023 study by Swiss academic researchers found that up to 46% of MTurk workers use AI models to complete tasks. Last month, Amazon said it would stop accepting new MTurk customers, which many workers saw as a sign that the service was about to end.

Some insurance and travel companies still rely on MTurk for data workers and are now looking for alternative platforms. An Amazon representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.