Amazon to close Mechanical Turk platform by September 30, 2026

Amazon confirmed that Mechanical Turk, its 21-year-old crowdsourcing marketplace, will be discontinued on September 30, 2026. The service, introduced in 2005 and described by founder Jeff Bezos as “artificial artificial intelligence,” connected a large pool of workers—often referred to as “turkers”—to simple digital jobs like data annotation, audio transcription, and survey responses. At its height, the platform supported more than 500,000 workers, but the rise of sophisticated AI models and specialized competitors such as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific has led to a steady decline.

Amazon attempted to reposition the service as a data-annotation source for its SageMaker machine-learning offering, yet investment in improvements lagged behind rivals. Critics point to a 2023 Swiss study showing many turkers now use AI themselves, raising questions about data quality. For a subset of workers, the platform was a primary source of flexible income, and its shutdown leaves them facing an uncertain future.