GoKawiilAmazon to shut down Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform in 2026
Amazon announced it will close AWS Mechanical Turk, its 21-year-old crowdsourced task platform, effective September 30, 2026. The service once connected over 500,000 workers to small paid digital tasks like data labeling and transcription, work Jeff Bezos called 'artificial artificial intelligence.' Amazon said the closure follows an internal review of its programs and tools.
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Mechanical Turk helped pioneer the human-in-the-loop data labeling industry that underpins today's AI systems, and its decline reflects how newer specialized startups like Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific have overtaken Amazon in supplying data workers for AI training. The shutdown also signals a shift in how tech companies source human feedback as AI models grow more capable and demand more sophisticated, specialized annotation work rather than simple crowdsourced microtasks.
- Amazon will close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending a 21-year-old crowdsourcing platform.
- The service, once used to label data and train early AI, had been declining amid competition from newer data-labeling startups.
- Its closure highlights how AI data annotation has evolved beyond simple crowdsourced microtasks toward specialized platforms.
Ghost Work" by Mary L. Gray & Siddharth Suri — This book is the definitive deep dive into the invisible human labor behind "artificial artificial intelligence" — including platforms like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. With MTurk winding down after two decades, it's the perfect read to understand who those hundreds of thousands of workers were and what the crowdwork economy looks like next.
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Published there as: “Amazon service Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence' is shutting down”
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