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

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 vali…