Amazon to Close Mechanical Turk on Sept. 30 After Two Decades

Amazon Mechanical Turk, the microtask marketplace that helped train a generation of AI systems, will permanently close on September 30, 2026, roughly one month after Amazon notified workers by banner and email on August 25.

The platform had over 500,000 workers signed up across more than 200 countries at the time of the announcement, according to an op-ed in Tech Policy Press by Krystal Kauffman, a former MTurk worker who has been Lead Organizer of the worker-advocacy group Turkopticon since 2020. Two experts in our Who's Who directory shared the piece, a sign it is circulating among people who follow data-worker issues. Launched in late 2005, MTurk became a common back-end for surveys, data collection, AI training, content moderation and, Kauffman writes, government projects.

Amazon's notice was terse. "Mechanical Turk will close September 30, 2026," the company told workers. "We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments."

Kauffman, who also worked as a Community-Based Researcher with the Distributed AI Research Institute on its Data Workers' Inquiry project, frames the shutdown as a visibility problem as much as a labor one. "The people doing the labor that made today's automations possible are the least visible in the system," she writes. She names Senator Ed Markey and Representative Pramila Jayapal as lawmakers who have paid attention to data-worker treatment, but describes no comprehensive federal framework as the platform winds down.

Her closing challenge is aimed at regulators: "Without even a consistent understanding of who these workers are, what they do, and how much their labor contributes to the economy, how can we expect policymakers to regulate responsibly?"