Amazon will permanently close Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourced-labor marketplace it once called “artificial artificial intelligence,” on September 30, 2026, according to a notice posted on the service’s website.
What Amazon announced
The company said it “regularly evaluates its programs, tools and services” and decided to close Mechanical Turk following such a review. Launched in 2005, the platform let businesses hire remote workers for small digital jobs — known as Human Intelligence Tasks — such as labeling images, transcribing audio, or completing surveys. Amazon had already stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers on July 30, moving the service into maintenance-only mode ahead of the final shutdown.
Two related Amazon Web Services tools, SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI, will close the same day — meaning AWS is exiting the human data-annotation infrastructure business entirely.
Why now
For two decades, Mechanical Turk workers handled the small, repetitive tasks that helped bootstrap machine learning, including, in its later years, labeling and rating data used to train large language models. That work has increasingly shifted to specialized firms such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific, which recruit annotators specifically for AI training pipelines and often pay more than Amazon’s two-decade-old marketplace.
The closure is a symbolic marker of how far AI has advanced: a service Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once described as “artificial artificial intelligence” — humans performing tasks computers couldn’t — is being wound down as AI systems and the specialized data-labeling industry that feeds them have matured enough to make it obsolete.
What it means for workers
Amazon has not detailed what happens to workers’ accumulated reputation scores or requesters’ account balances after the shutdown. Both groups have been directed to a FAQ page to prepare for the closure — part of a broader shift in how AI-related jobs are structured, as demand moves from broad crowdsourced piecework toward specialized, better-paid annotation contracts.