Amazon Sets Sept. 30 Shutdown for Bezos-Era Mechanical Turk

Amazon has told users of Mechanical Turk that the crowdsourced-work platform will close on September 30, 2026, ending a service launched in 2005 that Jeff Bezos once described as "artificial artificial intelligence." CNBC first reported the customer email.

The wording is flat. "Following an assessment, Amazon made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026," the notice said, adding that "We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments." AWS had already stopped accepting new customer registrations on July 30, 2026, closing the sister annotation services SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI to new users the same day.

The service farmed out "Human Intelligence Tasks," things like audio transcription, image captioning and data labeling that were trivial for people but too hard for computers. Workers took them for a few cents each; one aggrieved worker put the average around 20 cents per task.

The premise cracked as the models MTurk had helped train got good enough to do the work themselves. In 2023, TechCrunch reported on an EPFL study estimating that 33 to 46 percent of surveyed workers were completing text tasks using LLMs like ChatGPT, meaning humans were being paid to relay a machine's guesses. A newer crop of AI-native data-labeling companies, including Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific, had already pulled requesters away. Mercor turned up in our tracker two weeks back hunting shuttered-startup Slack archives for the same kind of human signal MTurk used to produce.

Existing customers now have about five weeks before cutoff. Amazon has directed them to a FAQ page to prepare for the closure.