Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, the human workforce it sold as AI

Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk on 30 September. The marketplace is 21 years old, and it paid people a few cents at a time to do work that computers could not. Jeff Bezos once called it “artificial artificial intelligence”.

A banner across the MTurk homepage sets out the decision. “We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” it reads. “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.”

The notice then repeats the date and adds one word to it. Mechanical Turk will “permanently close”, and workers and requesters are pointed to an FAQ page to learn how to prepare.

Annie Palmer reported the closure for CNBC on Tuesday evening. Amazon has published no separate statement beyond the banner.

What Mechanical Turk was

Launched in 2005, the platform matched workers with what Amazon calls Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs. These were small jobs paying a few cents each: labelling data, transcribing audio and video, answering surveys.

The rest of the homepage still sells the service in the present tense, underneath the closure banner. It offers content moderation, data deduplication, product and image categorisation, survey participation and research, and describes the pitch as a global, on-demand, 24×7 workforce.

Amazon’s own product documentation puts the marketplace at more than 500,000 workers across 190 countries. There was no minimum project size and the workforce was available around the clock. Requesters paid nothing until they accepted the work, and could restrict jobs to what Amazon calls Master Workers.

The name came from an 18th century chess-playing machine. It had a human chess master hidden inside it. Amazon first built the service to help label data on its own store, according to a New York Times report from 2007.

The platform had been shrinking

Krista Pawloski is a data worker and an organiser with the advocacy group Turkopticon. She told CNBC that MTurk had been in decline for years. Amazon put fewer resources into improving it while rivals arrived, she said, and many turkers moved to competing platforms.

Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific all now recruit workers to train models. Amazon tried to keep pace by marketing MTurk as a data annotation source for SageMaker. Its own page promised customers the fastest turnaround for human review and labelling jobs, with workers available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Last month the company stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers. Workers on Reddit read that as the end, and they were right.

Nearly half the workers were using AI

A 2023 study by academic researchers in Switzerland found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers were using AI models to complete their tasks. The finding raised questions about the quality of the data coming off the platform.

The service existed because some jobs were easy for people and hard for machines. That gap is what the study was measuring, and what has closed.

Amazon’s own page makes the point through a customer. Michael Schmitz, director of engineering at the Allen Institute for AI, is quoted saying his team used MTurk to build datasets that help models learn common sense knowledge, needed to answer basic questions that are easy for humans and still quite hard for machines.

Who is affected

Some insurance and travel companies still rely on MTurk for data work, and they are now scrambling to find alternative platforms, Pawloski said. They have 35 days from the announcement.

She started turking in 2008 while on maternity leave, for extra income. She moved to it full time in 2012 after losing her job, so she could care for her son, who has special needs. She began organising with Turkopticon in 2019.

Pawloski described the work as meaningful income with flexible hours, comparable to ride-hailing or Amazon Flex delivery, with the advantage of being remote and doable on a phone. “There’s some people that still pretty much still do it full time,” she said. “They’re concerned now.”

Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan said the company remains focused on delivering the best possible experience for all its Amazon and AWS customers.

The work has not gone away

Models still need labelled data, and the market for supplying it has grown rather than shrunk. What changed is who runs that market and what those buyers pay for. The rate for a HIT was a few cents, while the newer firms sell curated workforces and expert annotation.

Bill Gates published an essay on Wednesday warning that entry and mid-level jobs are most at risk from AI. Companies are moving without a plan for the upheaval, he wrote. We covered his Human Reserved proposal and his call for a tax on AI tokens.

Employers are already redrawing the bottom rung. EY now keeps interns for a year before offering them a job.

Training data has also become a constraint in its own right. China is running short of Chinese-language material, and a Cambridge startup raised money to turn video games into training sets.

What it means in Europe

Mechanical Turk workers sit in 190 countries, and European turkers lose the same platform on the same date. Amazon has not said whether it will offer them anything.

The EU Platform Work Directive, agreed in 2024, gives member states until December 2026 to bring in national rules. Those rules cover algorithmic management and employment status for platform workers. Microtask platforms fall within the scope, and the closure lands three months before the deadline.

Nothing in the notice mentions European obligations, and Amazon has not been asked about them publicly. Turkopticon has campaigned on platform working conditions since 2019, and no European regulator has commented on the closure.

What to watch

Amazon has given no reason beyond the word assessment. It has not said how many workers are still active on the platform, and the 500,000 figure comes from its own documentation rather than a recent count.

The FAQ page is where workers and requesters have been sent, and it is the only guidance Amazon has offered. The copyright line at the foot of the MTurk site still reads 2005 to 2018.

The requesters are the other open question. Pawloski named insurance and travel companies with 35 days to move.

Turkopticon has spent years documenting conditions on the platform, and the tasks have moved to Scale, Mercor and Prolific. Whether the advocacy follows them there is the thing to watch.

Amazon runs other operations where people feed machines. A reporter traced one of them to a book scanning warehouse in Las Vegas this month.