Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, the human labor platform it marketed as AI.

      Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026. The platform, which has been operational for 21 years, paid individuals small amounts to perform tasks that machines could not handle. Jeff Bezos once referred to it as “artificial artificial intelligence.”

      A message displayed on the MTurk homepage announces this decision, stating, “We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments. Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.” The announcement then reiterates the date and specifies that Mechanical Turk will “permanently close,” directing users to an FAQ page for preparation guidance.

      Annie Palmer reported the closure for CNBC on Tuesday evening, with Amazon having released no additional statement beyond the banner.

      Mechanical Turk was launched in 2005 and connected workers with what Amazon referred to as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). These tasks included simple jobs such as labeling data, transcribing audio and video, and answering surveys, with payments typically in cents.

      Despite the closure announcement, the rest of the homepage continues to market the service in present tense, detailing offerings like content moderation, data deduplication, categorization of products and images, and participation in surveys and research, presenting it as a global, on-demand, 24/7 workforce.

      According to Amazon's own product documentation, the marketplace boasted over 500,000 workers across 190 countries, without any minimum project size, with a workforce available at any time. Requesters incurred no costs until work was accepted and could limit jobs to what Amazon referred to as Master Workers. The name Mechanical Turk originated from an 18th-century chess-playing machine that hid a human chess master inside.

      However, the platform had been declining. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with the advocacy group Turkopticon, informed CNBC that MTurk had faced years of degradation. Amazon invested fewer resources into its advancement while rival platforms emerged, leading many workers to migrate to competing services. Companies like Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific now recruit workers for model training. Although Amazon attempted to position MTurk as a data annotation source for SageMaker, claiming to provide the fastest turnaround for human review and labeling services, the company stopped accepting new customers last month, signaling the end for many users.

      A 2023 study from academic researchers in Switzerland indicated that nearly 46% of Mechanical Turk workers employed AI models to complete their tasks, raising concerns about data quality from the platform. The existence of the service was predicated on jobs being easy for humans but challenging for machines, a distinction that the study suggested has narrowed.

      While some insurance and travel firms still depend on MTurk for data-related tasks, they are now seeking alternative platforms with just 35 days left from the announcement. Pawloski, who began using the platform in 2008 and transitioned to full-time work in 2012, described it as providing meaningful income and flexible hours, similar to ride-hailing or Amazon Flex delivery, with the added benefit of being remote and suitable for mobile devices.

      Amazon's spokesperson Montana MacLachlan stated that the company remains focused on delivering the best possible experience for all customers of Amazon and AWS.

      Despite the closure of Mechanical Turk, the demand for labeled data persists, and the market for such services has expanded, with the primary change being in who operates that market and at what costs. While MTurk offered tasks for a few cents, newer companies are providing curated workforces and specialized annotation services.

      Bill Gates recently published an essay warning that entry- and mid-level jobs are particularly vulnerable to AI advancements, noting that companies are acting without a coherent strategy to address this disruption. There’s a growing trend among employers to redefine entry-level positions, as seen with EY retaining interns for a year before offering them jobs.

      Training data itself has become a limiting factor, as seen in the shortage of Chinese-language material in China, while a startup in Cambridge has secured funding to convert video games into training datasets.

      For European workers, the impact is significant as they will also lose the platform on the same closing date. Although the EU Platform Work Directive, agreed upon in 2024, allows member states until December 2026 to implement national regulations regarding algorithmic management and employment status for platform workers, Amazon has not clarified whether it will provide any alternatives for affected European users. Turkopticon has been advocating for better working conditions on platform work since 2019, yet no European regulators have commented on this closure.

      At present, Amazon has not disclosed the reasons behind the decision beyond the term "assessment." The company has also not provided information on the number of active workers still utilizing the platform, and the stated figure of 500,000 remains unverified.

      The FAQ page remains the sole source of guidance for workers and requesters after the announcement, with the copyright notice on the MTurk site still listing dates from 200