Amazon to Shut Down Mechanical Turk on September 30

Amazon will permanently shut down its crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending a 21-year experiment that once connected hundreds of thousands of remote workers with digital tasks that computers struggled to perform. The company announced the closure in a notice posted to the platform's website, stating the decision followed a regular evaluation of its programs and services.

Amazon did not provide a specific reason for the shutdown but noted that the landscape for such work has changed significantly. Mechanical Turk, launched in 2005, created a marketplace for companies and researchers to hire people, known as Turkers, to complete small online jobs called Human Intelligence Tasks. These included data validation, content moderation, survey completion, and image labeling. At its peak, the platform served more than 500,000 workers from over 190 countries. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once described the service as "artificial artificial intelligence," referring to its use of human labor for tasks that were difficult for software.

In recent years, however, the platform has been in decline. According to Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with the...