Amazon to shut down Mechanical Turk platform in September 2026

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that it will shut down Amazon Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending the 21-year history of the crowdsourced labor platform. The service, which launched in 2005, was designed to provide “human intelligence” for tasks that computers could not reliably perform, such as data labeling, transcription, and content moderation.

The closure follows a July decision by Amazon to stop accepting new customers for the platform. The shutdown also affects related services, including SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI.

Industry analysts suggest the rise of advanced artificial intelligence has contributed to the platform's decline. As AI systems become increasingly capable of performing the mundane digital tasks once reserved for human gig workers, the boundary between human and machine intelligence has blurred. A 2023 study noted that a significant portion of Mechanical Turk workers were already using large language models like ChatGPT to complete tasks.