Amazon to Close Mechanical Turk Sept. 30, Ending a 21-Year Data-Work Market

Amazon will close AWS Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending a marketplace that has connected people to small digital jobs since 2005. Some insurance and travel companies that still depend on the service are seeking other platforms, according to Turkopticon organizer Krista Pawloski.

A marketplace built for tasks machines missed

Mechanical Turk matched workers with small jobs Amazon called Human Intelligence Tasks, including data labeling, audio or video transcription, and surveys. The premise was simple: send out work that people could complete easily but computers could not. Tasks typically paid only a few cents each.

That arrangement made Mechanical Turk an early source of on-demand human input for digital systems. Amazon at one point said the platform served more than 500,000 workers, though that is a historical figure rather than a count of workers still active before the closure. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once called the model “artificial artificial intelligence.”

A general labor pool gave way to specialist services

The service also became part of Amazon’s AI tooling: Amazon marketed Mechanical Turk as a source of data annotation for SageMaker. But demand for people to train AI models drew in specialist platforms, including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific, while AI models themselves advanced rapidly.

Pawloski said Amazon appeared to put fewer resources into improving Mechanical Turk as those alternatives expanded, prompting many workers to move elsewhere. Amazon’s closure notice said the decision followed an assessment of its programs, tools, and services; it did not identify a more specific operational reason for ending the platform.

The effect is not limited to annotation buyers

For workers, the loss is a channel for remote piecework rather than just a change in where training data is sourced. Pawloski said Mechanical Turk and comparable platforms can provide meaningful income and flexible hours, with work that can be completed on a smartphone. Some people still do the work full time and are concerned about the shutdown, she said.

The human-review promise had a growing complication

A 2023 study by academic researchers in Switzerland found that up to 46% of the Mechanical Turk workers it examined used AI models to complete tasks. The result does not measure every worker or every job on the platform. It does, however, show why verifying the source of an answer had become difficult in a marketplace whose value rested on human review: a requester could receive model-assisted output when it was seeking a person’s judgment.