Amazon Closes Mechanical Turk After 21 Years

Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk on 30 September, closing the crowdwork marketplace it launched in 2005 and, with it, one of the quiet foundations of the modern AI industry. The company confirmed the wind-down in late August, telling customers the service and its associated tooling would stop operating at the end of next month, as TechRepublic and Quartz reported.

Mechanical Turk, usually shortened to MTurk, paid people small sums to complete tasks that software handled poorly: labelling images, transcribing audio, moderating text, answering survey questions. Jeff Bezos once described the idea as "artificial artificial intelligence", a marketplace where human judgement stood in for the machine intelligence that did not yet exist. At its height the platform connected more than 500,000 workers with businesses and academic researchers who needed cheap, fast human input.

The labour that taught the machines

The irony of the closure is hard to miss. Much of the labelled data that trained early machine-learning systems, and a good deal of the human feedback that later shaped large language models, passed through platforms like this one. The crowdworkers who tagged photographs and rated answers were building the training sets that made today's models possible.

Now the models are capable enough to absorb much of that work themselves. Amazon did not give a specific reason for the shutdown, and the decision follows its July move to stop accepting new MTurk customers. It arrives as AI systems take over the very microtasks the platform was built to route to people. A 2023 study found that roughly 46 percent of MTurk workers were already using AI tools to complete their assignments, a sign of how thoroughly the line between human and machine labour had blurred even inside the marketplace itself.

Amazon is also retiring the human-data services that grew up alongside MTurk. Several outlets, including TechTimes, reported that SageMaker Ground Truth and Augmented AI, the tools that let companies fold human review into their machine-learning pipelines, will close on the same date. Taken together, the moves read as Amazon stepping back from the business of brokering human judgement at scale.

What the workers lose

For the people who relied on MTurk, the closure is more than a symbolic milestone. The platform was never generous, and its pay drew years of criticism, but for many workers it was a flexible source of income and, for a large research community, an irreplaceable tool for running studies. Academics used it to recruit participants at speed and low cost. Both groups now have a month to find alternatives.

The shutdown fits a larger pattern the site has followed closely, from debates over whether AI is already cutting into employment to the growing automation of routine knowledge work. Mechanical Turk was one of the first places where people were paid to do the work computers could not. Its closing marks the point where, for a wide slice of those tasks, the computers finally can.