Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourced work platform that has run for 21 years. The company confirmed the shutdown in a notice posted to the Mechanical Turk website on Tuesday.
The platform, often called MTurk, will stop operating on September 30, 2026. Amazon said it regularly reviews its programs and makes changes based on those reviews.
Mechanical Turk launched in 2005. It connected workers with small digital jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks.
These tasks included labeling data, transcribing audio or video, and answering surveys. Workers typically earned a few cents per task.
A Two-Decade Run Comes to an End
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once described the service as "artificial artificial intelligence." The name fit because the tasks were simple for humans but hard for computers at the time.
The platform's name comes from an 18th century chess-playing machine. That original device looked automated but was secretly operated by a human chess master inside it.
Amazon built Mechanical Turk to help label large amounts of data on its online store. The New York Times has reported on this origin.
At its peak, the platform served more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon. These workers are commonly known as turkers.
Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with the advocacy group Turkopticon, said the platform had been in decline in recent years. She said Amazon invested fewer resources into MTurk as competing services grew.
Companies like Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific have entered the data labeling market. These platforms recruit workers to help train AI models.
Amazon also tried to use Mechanical Turk as a data source for its SageMaker service. An Amazon Web Services page said workers were available every day of the week for fast turnaround on labeling jobs.
Workers Search for New Options
Pawloski said many turkers have already shifted to other platforms as MTurk lost ground. She said this shift happened gradually over the past few years.
Some insurance and travel companies still rely on Mechanical Turk for data work. Pawloski said these companies are now looking for alternative platforms before the shutdown date.
A 2023 study from researchers in Switzerland raised questions about task quality on the platform. It found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete their assigned tasks.
Last month, Amazon stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers. Many workers took this as an early sign that the platform would soon close.
Pawloski began working on Mechanical Turk in 2008 while on maternity leave. She later turned to it full time in 2012 after losing her job, so she could care for her son with special needs.
She said data annotation work offers flexible hours and can be done from a smartphone. She compared it to other gig work such as ride-hailing or package delivery.
Pawloski said some workers still rely on the platform full time. She said those workers are now concerned about what comes next.
Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
