Amazon Is Closing Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026

Amazon is permanently shutting down Mechanical Turk, ending a 21-year run for one of the internet’s best-known human-work marketplaces. The company says AWS Mechanical Turk will close on September 30, 2026, following an assessment of its programs and services. 13

For current users, the immediate priority is preparation: workers should verify their payment method and transfer schedule in the MTurk Worker Portal, while requesters should review the platform’s closure guidance and preserve the data they need. 13

What Amazon announced

Amazon’s public explanation is brief. Its closure notice says the company regularly evaluates its programs, tools, and services, and that it decided to close AWS Mechanical Turk after an assessment. The notice confirms the permanent shutdown date but does not provide a detailed financial explanation, name a successor platform, or promise equivalent pricing and capabilities elsewhere. 513

The shutdown follows an earlier warning. On July 30, 2026, Amazon stopped accepting new MTurk customers. Existing customers could continue using the service, but AWS said it did not plan to introduce new features. 11 That effectively left current workers and requesters operating on a platform with no path for new customer growth and limited product development.

Why MTurk mattered

Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 as what Jeff Bezos called “artificial artificial intelligence”: a system that made human judgment available to companies through a digital marketplace. Its workers completed Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, including data labeling, transcription, surveys, and other small online jobs that were difficult for computers to handle reliably at the time. 3

Amazon reportedly first conceived the service as a way to label data across its retail business. At its height, the company said MTurk had served more than 500,000 workers, often known as “Turkers.” 3

The name itself described the platform’s central idea. The original Mechanical Turk was an 18th-century chess-playing machine that appeared autonomous but concealed a human operator. Amazon’s marketplace used a similar conceptual trick: digital products and workflows could appear automated while human workers supplied the judgment behind them. 3

The pressures that weakened the model

MTurk’s original advantage was access to inexpensive, flexible human input for tasks that software could not yet complete well. As AI systems improved at classification, transcription, and language-related work, more of those tasks became candidates for automation or for specialized data-service providers.

Competition also moved beyond Amazon’s general-purpose marketplace. Companies such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific entered or expanded in data labeling and AI-training services, competing for both customers and workers. 312 A worker advocate cited in reporting said Amazon had invested less in improving MTurk, a factor associated with workers moving elsewhere. 3

There were also growing questions about whether MTurk responses were reliably human. A 2023 analysis estimated that 33% to 46% of MTurk workers used large language models for writing tasks. That is an estimate from one analysis—not evidence that all workers or all tasks were completed by AI—but it raised concerns for organizations seeking dependable human-generated data. 11

These developments help explain why MTurk’s role diminished, but they should not be presented as Amazon’s official reason for the shutdown. Amazon has publicly cited an internal assessment rather than specifically blaming AI, competition, or data quality. 13

What the closure means for workers

For some workers, MTurk was more than an occasional source of online piecework. Reporting describes it as an important flexible-income option, including for people who relied on the platform regularly or full time. 15

Workers should check their payment preferences and make sure a payment method and transfer schedule are configured before the shutdown. Amazon’s FAQ says payments will be distributed according to existing payment arrangements and provides instructions for reviewing those settings. 13

The closure also ends access to a long-standing ecosystem of requester relationships, task-search tools, and work routines. Amazon has confirmed the date, but it has not identified a replacement marketplace for workers or guaranteed that comparable tasks will be available elsewhere.

What the closure means for requesters

Organizations that still use MTurk for surveys, labeling, transcription, research, or operational workflows will need to do more than find a new vendor. They will need to compare worker availability, screening, quality controls, pricing, privacy practices, APIs, and the ability to reproduce existing results.

Reports have identified insurance and travel companies among businesses seeking alternatives, illustrating how a shutdown of a consumer-facing website can affect internal data and operations well beyond the technology sector. 8

The practical lesson is that migration should begin before September 30. Requesters should inventory active HITs and historical data, document task instructions and quality checks, export necessary records, and run parallel tests with alternative providers rather than assuming that another marketplace will behave like MTurk.

The broader significance

Mechanical Turk was created to work around the limits of AI by putting people inside automated workflows. Its closure does not mean that human judgment is no longer valuable. Instead, the market appears to be shifting away from a broad microtask marketplace toward more specialized, managed, and AI-focused data services. That interpretation is supported by the rise of competing providers, but it remains an industry explanation—not Amazon’s stated rationale. 31214

MTurk’s 21-year history therefore ends with an irony built into its name. The platform once used concealed human labor to make digital systems seem more intelligent. In 2026, the same advances in AI that expanded demand for training data also reduced the value of some routine tasks and changed the economics of the marketplace. Amazon’s September 30 deadline makes that transition concrete for the workers and companies that remain on the platform.