End of an AI Era: Amazon Closes Mechanical Turk after 21 Years
After over two decades in operation, Amazon has declared the permanent closure of its AWS Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform, effective from September 30, 2026. The crowdsourced labor marketplace, which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once termed as “artificial artificial intelligence,” was launched in 2005. At its peak, it linked more than 500,000 workers across 190 countries with businesses in need of assistance with small digital tasks.
MTurk provided a platform for companies and researchers to post “Human Intelligence Tasks” — small jobs such as data labeling, audio transcription, image captioning, and survey completion. These tasks, which typically paid workers a few cents each, formed the backbone of the data pipelines that trained many of today’s most potent AI models. Ironically, the AI systems that MTurk helped build have now rendered the platform largely obsolete. A 2023 EPFL study estimated that between 33% and 46% of MTurk workers were already using large language models like ChatGPT to complete their assigned text tasks.
Amazon ceased accepting new MTurk customers in July 2026, and the formal shutdown announcement confirms the simultaneous closure of the related SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI services. Competing data-labeling platforms such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific are expected to absorb the displaced workforce and business demand. Existing requesters have until September 30 to export data and migrate their workflows.
Source: CNBC — Amazon service Bezos once called ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ is shutting down