Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk after 21 years as AI reshapes crowdsourced work

Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, ending a 21-year experiment in crowdsourced digital labor that once put humans behind tasks computers could not handle. The timing carries a certain irony: artificial intelligence is getting better at many of the jobs that helped make Mechanical Turk useful in the first place.

AWS Mechanical Turk, better known as MTurk, will close on September 30, 2026, Amazon said Tuesday.

“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” Amazon said in a notice posted on the Mechanical Turk website. “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.”

The shutdown marks the end of one of Amazon’s longest-running and strangest internet experiments. Launched in 2005, MTurk created a marketplace where companies and researchers could pay people to complete small online jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs.

Amazon described MTurk as a crowdsourcing marketplace that allowed businesses to break large manual projects into smaller online “microtasks” and distribute them across a global workforce. Those jobs included data validation, research, surveys, content moderation and data collection.

The premise rested on a simple limitation of computing at the time. As Amazon put it, “there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers.”

That line now reads almost like a time capsule. Many of the tasks Amazon cited as examples have become targets for increasingly capable AI systems, changing both the demand for basic microtask labor and the type of human expertise AI companies are willing to pay for.

Those jobs ranged from labeling images and transcribing audio to answering surveys and categorizing information. Payments could amount to just pennies per task, but the platform grew into a global labor marketplace that at one point counted more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon.

Jeff Bezos famously described the concept as “artificial artificial intelligence.” The phrase captured what made MTurk unusual. Instead of software pretending to think like a person, Amazon put real people behind tasks machines struggled to do.

Two decades later, that relationship has flipped.

AI changed the economics behind Mechanical Turk

Modern AI models can now handle many tasks that once required armies of online workers. Image classification, transcription, text analysis, and other forms of data processing have become standard capabilities of AI systems.

Human labor has not disappeared from AI development. Its role has changed.

A new generation of companies, including Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific, has built businesses around supplying human expertise and training data to AI developers. The work can extend far beyond basic image labeling, with companies seeking programmers, scientists and other skilled professionals to evaluate and improve increasingly capable models.

MTurk found itself competing in a market that looked very different from the one Amazon helped create.

Krista Pawloski, a longtime data worker and organizer with worker advocacy group Turkopticon, described MTurk as “in decline,” saying Amazon appeared to invest fewer resources in the service as competing data platforms gained ground. Many workers eventually moved elsewhere.

Another problem hid in plain sight: AI itself began showing up on a platform built around human intelligence.

A 2023 study by researchers in Switzerland found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers participating in one experiment appeared to use AI models to complete tasks, CNBC reported. The finding raised questions about data quality and revealed a strange reversal: a service created to supply human answers where computers fell short.

Amazon had tried connecting MTurk to the AI boom. AWS marketed its workforce as a source of human review and data labeling for Amazon SageMaker, telling customers that workers were available around the clock.

Signs of MTurk’s approaching end became clearer last month when Amazon stopped accepting new customers. Workers interpreted the decision as a warning that a shutdown could follow.

For some, the closure is more than the retirement of an aging Amazon service. MTurk provided flexible remote income to people who depended on work they could perform from home, sometimes using little more than a smartphone. Pawloski said some workers still rely on the platform full time.

“They’re concerned now,” she said.

Mechanical Turk takes its name from an 18th-century chess-playing machine that appeared capable of defeating human opponents. A human chess player controlled the machine from inside.

Amazon revived that idea for the internet age: put humans behind the machine whenever software could not do the job.

Twenty-one years later, the machines finally caught up to a growing share of the work.