Amazon Shuts Down Mechanical Turk After 21 Years as AI Reshapes Crowd Work

Amazon will fully close Mechanical Turk (MTurk), its crowdsourced labor marketplace launched in 2005, on September 30, 2026. New signups already ended July 30. The exit of the service Jeff Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence' marks how data labeling is being remade by AI automation and specialist rivals like Scale AI and Mercor.

Amazon is fully shutting down Mechanical Turk (MTurk), its crowdsourced labor marketplace, on September 30, 2026 — 21 years after it launched in 2005. New customer signups already closed on July 30. The marketplace, where workers around the world earned a few cents apiece to complete "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs) like data labeling, surveys, and transcription, had been in long decline amid advancing AI models and the rise of specialist data firms such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific. It is the end of a service founder Jeff Bezos once dubbed "artificial artificial intelligence."

Amazon is closing the doors on Mechanical Turk, its signature crowd-labor marketplace. The company said it decided to sunset the service on September 30, 2026, following an internal review of its programs and services. New customer signups had already ended on July 30, alongside a wind-down of adjacent data-labeling offerings including AWS SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI (A2I).

Two decades of "artificial artificial intelligence"

Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 as a marketplace for small tasks that resisted full automation — image classification, sentiment labeling, audio and video transcription, survey completion, and in earlier years even solving CAPTCHAs — broken into tiny units and farmed out to workers worldwide for a few cents each. Amazon called each unit a "Human Intelligence Task" (HIT).

Even the name is telling. The 18th-century chess-playing automaton known as "The Turk" was a hoax, with a human hidden inside operating the machine. Bezos invoked that history in calling MTurk "artificial artificial intelligence" — intelligence that looks like a machine but is actually powered by people. Fittingly, MTurk became the hidden engine behind countless products marketed as AI that were really run by humans in the background.

Launched 2005 (21 years ago)
New signups closed July 30, 2026
Full shutdown September 30, 2026
Task pricing a few cents per HIT
Wound down alongside SageMaker Ground Truth · Amazon A2I

Why now

The surface reason is decline. Amazon had effectively stopped investing in new features, and in the meantime a specialist data-labeling market boomed. Newer firms handling AI training data — Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific — pulled away both workers and customers with better rates, quality control, and vetted talent pools.

There is an irony, too. Beginning in 2018, Amazon repositioned MTurk as a tool for annotating data to train neural networks. Yet a 2023 analysis found that 33% to 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks — undermining the very premise of "human-labeled" data. Companies hired people to train AI, only for those people to hand the work back to AI, a snake-eating-its-own-tail loop.

Item	Detail
New signups closed	2026-07-30
Full shutdown	2026-09-30
Existing customers	Normal use until shutdown
AWS statement (July)	"Careful consideration… no new features planned"
Rising alternatives	Scale AI · Mercor · Prolific

In its July notice, Amazon said the move came "after careful consideration," adding that existing customers could keep using the service as normal, and that it would continue investing in security and availability improvements but did not plan to introduce new features. A service already on life support was confirmed for full shutdown in late August.

The next chapter of crowd work

MTurk's closure is more than the retirement of a single product. It signals that the AI boom is displacing the older, low-wage forms of human labor that once propped that same AI up. As demands for training-data quality rise, the market is shifting from cheap, mass crowds toward vetted, specialist labelers — even as the models themselves take over a growing share of data generation and annotation.

If your team runs an AI training-data pipeline, MTurk's exit is a prompt to audit data provenance and labeler verification. A label marked "human-made" may in fact be LLM output — bake quality audits and gold-set validation explicitly into the pipeline as a safeguard.

Amazon will fully close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026; new signups already ended July 30
End of a 21-year marketplace where workers completed "Human Intelligence Tasks" for cents apiece
Decline driven by specialist labelers (Scale AI, Mercor, Prolific) and advancing AI automation
A 2023 analysis found 33–46% of workers used LLMs to do tasks, undermining "human-labeled" data
The market is shifting from cheap mass crowds toward vetted, specialist labelers