Amazon is shutting down its crowdworking platform Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026 – after 21 years. Launched in 2005, the marketplace for tiny digital tasks once helped feed today’s AI era with training data.
From “artificial artificial intelligence” to phase-out
On Mechanical Turk (MTurk for short), companies distributed small “Human Intelligence Tasks” – from data labeling and transcription to surveys – to people worldwide. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once called the principle “artificial artificial intelligence.” At its peak the platform counted more than 500,000 workers. Amazon had already stopped accepting new customers on July 30, 2026; the associated SageMaker Ground Truth service is being discontinued too.
AI overtakes the original
The very AI that MTurk helped build now makes the platform redundant: modern models handle many of the micro-tasks automatically. For the remaining, more demanding data labeling, specialized providers such as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific have become established.
Sources: CNBC, TechCrunch.
