Amazon to Shut Down Mechanical Turk After 21 Years

Amazon announced it will close AWS Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026. [1][2] The crowdsourced work platform launched in 2005 to match workers with small tasks like transcribing audio, labeling data, or answering surveys for a few cents per job. [1]

At its peak, the platform served over 500,000 workers, known as "turkers." [1] Amazon founder Jeff Bezos originally described the service as "artificial artificial intelligence" because it outsourced tasks that computers struggled to complete. [1] Recently, however, the platform has been in decline, according to Turkopticon organizer Krista Pawloski. [1]

The closure of Mechanical Turk marks a generational transition in how tech companies source human labor for AI data preparation. As AI models have advanced rapidly, a new crop of specialized data startups, including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific, have entered the market to recruit workers specifically for model training. What the sources don't address: Whether Amazon plans to launch a dedicated successor platform for AI data labeling or if it will rely entirely on external vendors going forward.