Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, the online marketplace that for 21 years connected businesses and researchers with workers performing small digital tasks, the company announced. The platform, commonly known as MTurk, will close on September 30, 2026, following an internal assessment. Amazon had already stopped accepting new customers on July 30.
Launched in 2005, MTurk became one of the internet's earliest marketplaces for invisible digital labor, allowing requesters to post Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, that workers completed for pay often measured in cents. The service relied on people to handle simple jobs that computers struggled with, such as labeling images, transcribing audio, and sorting data. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, once called the platform "artificial artificial intelligence," a reference to how it used human workers to perform tasks that appeared automated. The name itself came from the Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century chess-playing machine that seemed automated but secretly depended on a human operator.
Over time, MTurk became part of the infrastructure for machine learning. Amazon described the platform as a way to collect and annotate large datasets, use human feedback to validate models, and retrain machine learning systems. At one point, the company said the marketplace had more than 500,000 workers.
The type of work that defined MTurk has increasingly moved toward automation, while newer companies such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have built businesses around sourcing human labor specifically for training advanced AI models. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with the advocacy group Turkopticon, told CNBC that MTurk had been declining for years as Amazon invested fewer resources in the platform and workers migrated elsewhere. Pawloski began working on MTurk in 2008 while on maternity leave and moved to the work full time in 2012. She described platforms like MTurk as a source of "meaningful income" for people who need flexible, remote work.
A particularly circular development emerged in recent years. A 2023 analysis cited by TechCrunch found that an estimated 33% to 46% of MTurk workers in the study were using large language models to complete tasks. A system designed to supply human judgment for computers was, increasingly, just relaying answers that machines had already generated.
Amazon has not publicly tied the shutdown directly to advances in AI. Its notice says only that the decision followed an assessment of its services. However, Amazon is not leaving the crowdsourced labor business entirely. AWS still offers SageMaker Ground Truth, its in-house data-labeling tool, as an alternative for customers who relied on MTurk. Some existing MTurk requesters, including insurance and travel companies, have continued using the platform right up to the shutdown notice, according to Pawloski.