Bots Matter: A new alert warns that Amazon Mechanical Turk will cease to exist a month from now. Amazon has not provided a specific reason for the change, but Mechanical Turk has been steadily losing ground to newer competitors and AI-based platforms.
After being in the crowdsourcing market for more than two decades, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) will permanently shut down on September 30, 2026. Amazon said it regularly evaluates its tools, programs, and services, and MTurk is clearly being left behind as other ventures have emerged as AI-focused training initiatives.
Amazon Mechanical Turk originally launched in 2005, providing a platform for companies to hire remote workers – known as Turkers – to perform menial, on-demand tasks. Operated under the Amazon Web Services brand and inspired by the original Mechanical Turk machine, MTurk offered Turkers a way to earn a few dollars per week by validating or tagging data, moderating content, answering surveys, and more.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once called MTurk the "artificial artificial intelligence" service, referring to the platform's ability to outsource tasks that computers found difficult to perform compared with humans. Over time, MTurk grew enough to "employ" more than 500,000 remote Turkers from over 190 countries. However, according to the data-worker advocacy group Turkopticon, the platform has been in decline for years.
In recent years, MTurk has faced competition from modern alternatives such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific. These companies recruit workers to help train large AI models. A 2023 study questioned the quality of data coming from MTurk, highlighting how a significant number of Turkers (46 percent) were using generative AI and chatbots to complete the platform's tasks.
MTurk has also been criticized for how the platform exploited human labor. Computer scientist Jaron Lanier said that the service was designed to turn people into software components for larger business initiatives. MTurk was known for attracting people in precarious economic conditions, leaving them with little bargaining power in the event of billing disputes.
In fact, Amazon started winding down MTurk last month by no longer accepting new customers. Now, the latest message clearly explains that Turkers and companies will soon be unable to access the platform. The company has also prepared an FAQ explaining how workers can resolve their remaining billing issues with the platform.