Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending the 21-year run of a platform that once brokered penny-per-task work to more than 500,000 people across 190 countries. “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026,” the notice posted to the MTurk website reads. Spokesperson Montana MacLachlan said Amazon is “focused on delivering the best possible experience for all our Amazon and AWS customers.”

The closure isn’t a surprise so much as an overdue formality. Amazon quietly stopped accepting new MTurk customers on July 30, and on the same day closed SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI to new users, cauterizing the entire human-in-the-loop stack in a single afternoon.

Launched in 2005 and named for an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that concealed a human operator inside its cabinet, MTurk was the original gig-economy proof of concept. Jeff Bezos described it in a 2007 New York Times article as “artificial artificial intelligence,” a phrase that reads today less like a slogan than a confession. Human Intelligence Tasks paid a few cents apiece. The underlying premise, that invisible piecework could feed a smarter software layer, is precisely what large language models now automate at scale.

Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, told CNBC the platform had been “in decline” for years as Amazon invested less in it and rivals pulled workers and requesters away. She said insurance and travel companies still routing tasks through MTurk are “scrambling to find alternative platforms.” A 2023 study by Swiss researchers at EPFL estimated that 33 to 46 percent of MTurk workers were already using large language models to complete text tasks, which is its own quiet epitaph.

The migration options are narrower than they look. Scale AI and Mercor have moved upmarket toward expert annotation, not the penny-per-task volume small operators depended on for survey fielding, persona validation, and content moderation. Amazon has directed users to an FAQ page and offered no migration tool.

What ends on September 30 isn’t just a product. It’s the specific arrangement, unnoticed by regulators and priced by the cent, that let the last two decades of the internet look smarter than it was.

Sources