Amazon logo on the facade of a brick office building with windows, San Francisco, California, August 29, 2025.
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Amazon will soon discontinue its 21-year-old crowdsourcing work platform, Mechanical Turk, the company announced Tuesday.
“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on our evaluations,” a notice posted on the Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website says. “After evaluation, we have decided to shut down AWS Mechanical Turk as of September 30, 2026.”
Founded in 2005, Mechanical Turk matches large numbers of workers with simple digital jobs, or “human intelligence tasks.” You are usually paid a few cents per task. This includes labeling data, transcribing audio and video, answering surveys, and more.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has described the service as “artificial artificial intelligence” because it performs tasks that are easy for humans to complete but that prove too difficult for computers.
The service’s name comes from the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th century chess-playing robot that was actually controlled by a human chess master. The New York Times reports that Amazon originally came up with the idea to help label large amounts of data on its vast web store.
Jeff Bezos attended the Viva Technology show held at Parc des Expositions in Paris, France on June 17, 2026.
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Amazon said the platform at one time served more than 500,000 workers, also known as Turkish workers. But in recent years, MTurk has been “in decline,” said Krista Pawlowski, a data worker and organizer at Turkopticon, an employee advocacy group for data workers.
Since MTurk’s initial launch, AI models have advanced rapidly, while a growing number of data startups such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have entered the market to recruit workers to train their models.
Amazon also sought to capitalize on demand for AI training by marketing MTurk as a data annotation source for its SageMaker service.
According to the Amazon Web Services webpage, “employees are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” “Human review tasks and labeling jobs are typically completed fastest using Amazon Mechanical Turk employees.”
Pawlowski said that at the same time as more data labeling services emerged, Amazon was investing fewer resources into improving MTurk, and many Turks appeared to be moving to competing platforms.
An Amazon representative did not respond to a request for comment.
Questions have been raised about the quality of some of the data generated on the platform. A 2023 study by Swiss academic researchers found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers use AI models to complete tasks.
Amazon announced last month that it would stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk, which many employees interpreted as a sign that the service would soon be discontinued.
Pawlowski said some insurance and travel companies still rely on MTurk for their data personnel and are now scrambling to find alternative platforms.
Pawlowski started Turkling in 2008 while on maternity leave to earn extra income, but transitioned to full-time work in 2012 when she quit her job to help care for her son, who has special needs. In 2019, she started organizing with Turkopticon. Turkopticon initially focused on Mechanical Turk workers, but has since expanded to include data workers more broadly.
Mechanical Turk and other data annotation platforms, like other gig jobs such as ride-hailing or Amazon Flex package delivery, offer “meaningful income” and flexible work hours, with the added benefit of being easy to complete remotely using a smartphone, Pawlowski said.
“Some of us are still working almost full-time,” Pawlowski said. “They’re worried now.”
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