Amazon Mechanical Turk Platform Shutdown Marks End of Era for Human-Powered AI Data Labeling
Amazon announced it's shuttering Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending the 21-year-old crowdsourced work platform that Jeff Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence.' The closure reflects how AI development has transformed data labeling, with newer competitors like Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific now dominating the market for training machine learning models.