Amazon Mechanical Turk Platform Shutdown Marks End of Era for Human-Powered AI Data Labeling

Amazon service Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence' is shutting down

* Amazon announced it's shuttering Mechanical Turk, a platform that matches workers with small digital tasks, on Sept. 30. * The platform launched in 2005 as a way to farm out tasks that are easy for humans to complete but too challenging for computers. * Jeff Bezos previously characterized the service as "artificial artificial intelligence." In this article * AMZN Follow your favorite stocksCREATE FREE ACCOUNT Amazon logo on brick office building facade with windows, San Francisco, California, Aug. 29, 2025. Smith Collection | Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images Amazon is soon pulling the plug on its 21-year-old crowdsourced work platform, called Mechanical Turk, the company said Tuesday. "We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments," a notice posted to the Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, website said. "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026." Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk matches legions of workers with simple digital jobs, or "Human Intelligence Tasks," that typically pay out a few cents per task. They include labeling data, transcribing audio or video or answering surveys. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos described the service as "artificial artificial intelligence," as it farmed out tasks that could be easily completed by humans but proved too challenging for computers. The service got its name from the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th century chess-playing robot that was actually controlled by a human chess master. Amazon originally conceived of the idea to assist with labeling reams of data on its sprawling webstore, The New York Times reported. Jeff Bezos attends the Viva Technology show at Parc des Expositions on June 17, 2026 in Paris, France. Chesnot | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images The platform at one point served more than 500,000 workers, also referred to as turkers, according to Amazon. But in recent years, MTurk had been "in decline," said Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, an employee advocacy group for data workers. AI models have advanced rapidly since MTurk first launched, while a growing crop of data startups such as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific have entered the market to recruit workers to train the models. Amazon also looked to capitalize on the demand for AI training by marketing MTurk as a data annotation source for its SageMaker service. "Workers are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week," according to an Amazon Web Services webpage. "You typically get the fastest turnaround for your human review tasks and labeling jobs when you use the Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce." Pawloski said Amazon seemed to invest fewer resources into improving MTurk at the same time as more data labeling services arrived, causing many turkers to shift to competing platforms. Representatives from Amazon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Questions have been raised about the quality of some data generated on the platform. A 2023 study from academic researchers in Switzerland found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete tasks. Last month, Amazon said it would stop accepting new Mechanical Turk customers, which many workers interpreted as a sign that the service would soon be discontinued. Some insurance and travel companies still depend on MTurk for data workers, and are now scrambling to find alternative platforms, Pawloski said. Pawloski started turking in 2008 while she was on maternity leave for supplemental income, before transitioning to the work full time when she was let go from her job in 2012 to help take care of her son with special needs. In 2019, she started organizing with Turkopticon, which originally focused on Mechanical Turk workers before expanding to include data workers more broadly. Mechanical Turk and other data annotation platforms provide "meaningful income" and flexible hours, similar to other gig jobs such as ride-hail services or Amazon Flex package delivery, with the added benefit of being remote and easily completed using a smartphone, Pawloski said. "There's some people that still pretty much still do it full time," Pawloski said. "They're concerned now." watch now VIDEO3:1403:14 Amazon soars on Q2 earnings Squawk Box Choose CNBC as your preferred source on Google and never miss a moment from the most trusted name in business news.

Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk after 21 years

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.

Amazon shutting down Mechanical Turk platform on Sept. 30, 2026

The 21-year-old platform matched workers with small digital tasks and once served more than 500,000 workers Amazon $AMZN announced Tuesday it will shut down its Mechanical Turk crowdsourced labor platform on September 30, 2026. The company said it made the decision following an internal assessment of its programs and services. "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026," a notice posted to the platform's website said. Amazon launched Mechanical Turk in 2005, building a marketplace where businesses could post small digital jobs -- formally known as Human Intelligence Tasks -- ranging from data labeling and audio or video transcription to survey completion. Workers are typically paid a few cents per task, according to CNBC. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos coined the phrase "artificial artificial intelligence" to describe the service, noting that it handed off to humans the kinds of tasks that computers still couldn't handle reliably. At its peak, the platform served more than 500,000 workers. In recent years, though, the service had been "in decline," according to CNBC, citing Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, an advocacy group for data workers. Pawloski said that Amazon appeared to invest fewer resources into improving the platform as competing data labeling services arrived, drawing workers away. The shutdown comes as AI models have advanced and a new crop of data labeling startups -- including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific -- have entered the market to recruit workers for AI training. Last month, Amazon stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers, a move many workers interpreted as a sign the service would soon close. Pawloski said insurance and travel companies that have continued to use the platform are now working to find replacement services before the shutdown. Pawloski, who started using the platform in 2008 and eventually made it her primary job by 2012, described it as a source of remote, flexible earnings for a broad range of workers. "There's some people that still pretty much still do it full time," Pawloski said. "They're concerned now." Questions about the quality of work on the platform surfaced in recent years. Research published in 2023 by Swiss academic researchers determined that as many as 46% of Mechanical Turk workers were using AI models to finish their assigned tasks.

Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk after 21 years, quietly ending the human-powered platform

In many ways, the decades-old digital labor service presaged aspects of the modern AI era. Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, after 21 years, ending one of the internet's earliest marketplaces for invisible digital labor -- as well as a platform that helped establish the human-data pipeline behind modern AI. The company said Mechanical Turk will close on September 30, 2026, after an internal assessment. Amazon had already stopped accepting new customers on July 30. The service launched in 2005 and connected businesses and researchers with workers who completed small online jobs, known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, often just a few cents each. A marketplace for work computers couldn't do Jeff Bezos had called MTurk 'artificial artificial intelligence,' a nod to how the service relied on people to handle simple digital tasks that computers still struggle to do, such as labeling images, transcribing audio, and sorting data. The name itself came from the Mechanical Turk, an 18th century chess-playing machine that appeared automated but secretly relied on a human operator. Over time, MTurk became part of the infrastructure for machine learning. Amazon still describes the platform as a way to collect and annotate large datasets, use human feedback to validate models, and retrain machine learning systems. At one point, Amazon said that the marketplace had more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon. The human-AI loop got stronger The type of work that defined MTurk has increasingly moved toward automation. At the same time, newer companies, including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have built businesses around sourcing human labor specifically for training advanced AI models. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with advocacy group Turkopticon, told CNBC that MTurk had been declining for years as Amazon invested fewer resources in the platform and workers migrated elsewhere. Pawloski began "turking" in 2008 while on maternity leave and moved to the work full time in 2012. She described platforms like MTurk as a source of "meaningful income" for people who need flexible, remote work.