Overview
- Amazon posted a notice in late August saying AWS Mechanical Turk will shut down on September 30, 2026 after an internal assessment of its services.
- The company had already stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers on July 30, a move workers widely saw as an early sign of the shutdown.
- The platform matched people with small online jobs called Human Intelligence Tasks, and at its peak it connected more than 500,000 workers to labeling, transcription and survey work.
- Researchers and worker organizers say the closure reflects advances in AI and the rise of specialist data-labeling firms, and a 2023 study found up to 46% of MTurk tasks used AI tools which raised data-quality concerns.
- Amazon is directing customers to AWS alternatives such as SageMaker Ground Truth while requesters and turkers scramble to find replacement services and income sources before the September 30 deadline.