Amazon is shutting Mechanical Turk on September 30 after 21 years

Amazon will close AWS Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending a platform that launched in 2005, a 21-year run. New signups already stopped on July 30, and requesters can award bonuses through October 30. Amazon's stated reason is generic: 'following an assessment.' The company did not cite AI. MTurk had more than 500,000 workers at its peak, and researchers who relied on it are pointed toward Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific.

AMZN is closing AWS Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026. The notice to users reads simply: "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026," with the company adding that it regularly evaluates its programs and makes adjustments accordingly. The wind-down is staged. New customer signups stopped on July 30, 2026, alongside AWS SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented A.I.; September 30 is the last day tasks are accepted; and requesters can award bonuses through October 30, 2026, with balance refunds inside 30 days of closure.

MTurk launched in 2005, making this a 21-year run rather than the shorter figure some coverage carries . It was one of the first microtask marketplaces at scale, matching requesters with a distributed workforce for data labelling, content moderation, transcription and survey work, and it drew the phrase "artificial artificial intelligence" from Jeff Bezos in the launch era, describing work that computers could not yet do. More than 500,000 workers used the platform at its peak.

It is worth separating what Amazon said from what the shutdown is being read to mean. Amazon's own statement does not mention AI at all. The framing that machine learning made human microtasking obsolete is reporting and analysis rather than company guidance, and the causal claim should be held loosely. What is documented is that the closure lands alongside the retirement of two adjacent human-in-the-loop AWS services, which is at least consistent with a narrowing of Amazon's managed data-labelling footprint.

The clearest immediate impact is on users rather than on Amazon's financials, where MTurk was never a disclosed revenue line. Displaced workers and requesters are being pointed toward Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific. Academic researchers, long the platform's quiet backbone for survey data, lose a standard instrument; a 2023 study by Swiss researchers had already found that up to 46% of MTurk workers appeared to be using AI models to complete tasks, which had eroded its value as a source of human responses. Watch whether AWS folds any of this capability into a newer labelling product, and whether the annotation specialists pick up the displaced demand.

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