Amazon announced it will shut down its crowdsourced labor platform Mechanical Turk by the end of September, leaving workers who depended on the service scrambling for alternatives.
The company posted a notice to the MTurk website confirming the closure, effective September 30, 2026. Amazon stopped accepting new customers on the platform last month, a move many workers on the MTurk Reddit community interpreted as a sign the end was near. Now it is official.
The shutdown closes a chapter that began in 2005, when Amazon launched the platform to connect businesses with a global pool of remote workers willing to complete small digital tasks, image labeling, survey responses, data categorization, for a few cents apiece. At its peak, Amazon said MTurk served more than 500,000 workers.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gave the service its memorable pitch in a 2007 New York Times interview, calling it "artificial artificial intelligence." The name itself came from an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that turned out to be a fraud, a machine that looked like a robot but was actually operated by a human chess master hidden inside. Bezos borrowed the concept: MTurk dressed up cheap human labor as a seamless digital service.
Amazon's explanation for the closure was sparse. The notice on the MTurk website read:
"We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments. Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026."
That is corporate-speak for "we're done here," and it left workers with little to go on. Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan offered only that the company was "focused on delivering the best possible experience for all our Amazon and AWS customers." No mention of workers. No transition plan. No severance.
The vagueness matters because MTurk was never just a side project for everyone who used it. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, an advocacy group originally built around MTurk's workforce, started turking in 2008 while on maternity leave. By 2012, after losing her job, she moved to the platform full time to support herself while caring for a son with special needs.
Pawloski described MTurk and similar data annotation platforms as a source of "meaningful income" with flexible hours. She told CNBC that some workers still rely on it as their primary livelihood.
"There's some people that still pretty much still do it full time. They're concerned now."
The irony of MTurk's demise is hard to miss. Amazon originally conceived the platform to help label data on its own web store, according to The New York Times. Over the years, academic researchers and AI companies used it heavily to generate the labeled datasets that train machine learning models. AWS even marketed MTurk as a data annotation source for its SageMaker AI service, boasting that workers were "available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week" and offered "the fastest turnaround for your human review tasks and labeling jobs."
But the AI models those workers helped build eventually started replacing the workers themselves. A 2023 study by academic researchers in Switzerland found that up to 46 percent of Mechanical Turk workers were using AI models to complete their tasks. The humans hired to do work machines could not do had started outsourcing that work to machines.
Meanwhile, competing data labeling startups, Scale AI, Mercor, Prolific, among others, entered the market and siphoned off both customers and workers. Pawloski said Amazon appeared to invest fewer resources into improving MTurk as the competition grew, and many turkers drifted to rival platforms. She described the service as having been "in decline" well before the official announcement.
The closure does not only affect individual workers. Pawloski noted that some insurance and travel companies still depend on MTurk for data processing tasks and are now scrambling to find alternative platforms. Amazon's announcement did not name any recommended replacement, and it remains unclear whether the company plans to offer migration support for existing business customers.
Pawloski began organizing with Turkopticon in 2019 as the group expanded its focus beyond MTurk to advocate for data workers across the industry. That broader mission now looks prescient. The workers who built the training data for the AI revolution were always treated as disposable inputs, paid a few cents per task, with no benefits, no employment protections, and no seat at the table when the platform's owners decided to walk away.
Amazon's two-sentence farewell confirmed what those workers already knew. When a company can replace you with the technology you helped create, the assessment does not take long.
