Amazon closes Mechanical Turk after 21 years
On 25 August 2026 Amazon announced it would permanently close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective 30 September 2026, stating that the decision followed an internal assessment of its programs and services. The platform launched in 2005 and matched requesters with workers performing 'Human Intelligence Tasks' — labeling data, transcribing audio, answering surveys — typically paying a few cents each, and at its height connected more than 500,000 workers worldwide. Amazon had stopped accepting new customers on 30 July 2026, a month before the closure announcement. Jeff Bezos originally described the service as 'artificial artificial intelligence.'
Why It Mattered
Mechanical Turk was the labor infrastructure on which modern machine learning was built, and its closure closes a distinct era in the field's history. The supervised-learning revolution of the 2010s depended on cheap, scalable human annotation, and MTurk was where that annotation was bought. The datasets that defined benchmarks in computer vision and natural language processing were assembled through crowdwork platforms of this kind, and a generation of academic experimental work in psychology, linguistics and human-computer interaction ran on the same pool of workers. The platform also supplied the vocabulary and the ethical arguments — piece-rate pay, worker invisibility, the term 'ghost work' — that shaped a decade of scholarship on the hidden human labor inside automated systems. The reason for closure is the historically interesting part. Demand shifted to specialised data vendors serving frontier labs, where the required work is expert preference ranking, red-teaming, and domain annotation rather than undifferentiated micro-tasks, and where models now perform many of the simple labeling jobs that once justified the platform. Bezos's original framing — humans simulating a machine — inverted as the machines became capable enough to absorb the tasks. For a history written in 2030, this is a clean dated endpoint for the crowdwork phase of AI data production, and a marker of the moment when the industry's human-labor dependency moved upmarket rather than disappearing. It is a closure with no replacement of the same open, general-purpose character.
Who Built It
Amazon Web Services
Applications
- Data Annotation
- Crowdsourcing
- Machine Learning Research