AWS says it plans to shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, “following an assessment”; the service, launched in 2005, outsourced tasks to 500K+ humans
Amazon is soon pulling the plug on its 21-year-old crowdsourced work platform, called Mechanical Turk, the company said Tuesday.
CNBC Annie Palmer
Related Coverage
- Welcome to the Amazon Mechanical Turk Requester User Interface Guide Amazon Web Services
- Amazon shutting down Mechanical Turk platform on Sept. 30, 2026 Quartz · Cris Tolomia
- Amazon to shut down Mechanical Turk after 21 years Tech in Asia · Minh Le
- Anthropic Contemplates the Ultimate Total Addressable Market Wall Street Journal · Steven Rosenbush
- Amazon Sunsets Crowd-Sourced Work Platform MTurk PYMNTS
- Amazon is shutting down a go-to option for gig workers. It's the latest casualty of AI growth. Business Insider · Alex Bitter
- Amazon Putting End to Service It Has Offered for 21 Years Newser · Kate Seamons
- Amazon Mechanical Turk Will Close September 30, Shutting Down SageMaker Ground Truth Too Tech Times · Jackie Manning
- Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk after 21 years, quietly ending the human-powered platform Fast Company · Arshi Qureshi
Analysis
Discussion
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@lmatsakis
Louise Matsakis
on x
Amazon is officially shutting down Mechanical Turk next month. It feels like the end of an era. I've written about the platform on and off for close to a decade. We wouldn't have the AI tools we do now if it weren't for the low-paid, largely invisible labor of MTurkers
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@kristap
Krista Pawloski
on bluesky
Here I talk a bit about the decline of Mturk and a bit of reassurance that @turkopticon.bsky.social is still here for the worker, no matter where you land. — www.cnbc.com/2026/08/25/a...
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@jordannovet.cnbc.com
Jordan Novet
on bluesky
Mechanical Turk walked so Scale AI could run? www.cnbc.com/2026/08/25/a...
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@ben_wray1989
Ben Wray
on x
Amazon Mechanical Turk is shutting down. The first microwork platform (workers complete short digital tasks from home for tiny sums) has been usurped by rivals like Scale AI, that are more adapted to generative AI. The microwork industry that AMT spawned is now bigger than ever.
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@calbucci
Marcelo Calbucci
on x
Strangely enough, agents would love to have access to mechanical turk to get tasks done by humans.
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@kirbywinfield
@kirbywinfield
on x
either the proprietary data off turk is worth billions or mercor is worth ten dollars
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@dwightchurchill
Dwight Churchill
on x
dwight churchill (@dwightchurchill) on X
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@lorak
Lora Kolodny
on bluesky
end of an era - Annie Palmer @cnbc.com reports Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk finally on Sept. 30. www.cnbc.com/2026/08/25/a...
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@quinnypig
Corey Quinn
on x
Pour one out for a legend.
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@techdreamzai
@techdreamzai
on x
@lmatsakis Every frontier model I've worked with has MTurk labor somewhere in its training pipeline. The labeling, the RLHF annotations, the safety evals. Most people using these models have no idea that work existed.
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@ainsworthkeith
Keith Ainsworth
on x
Uh-oh for humans. Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk — the service Jeff Bezos once called “artificial artificial intelligence.
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@emollick
Ethan Mollick
on x
Unsurprising but still big: MTurk is on its way out. Mechanical Turk was a mainstay of social & survey research through the 2010s, as it allowed you to quickly buy access to many representative humans. It was pretty good at it, until LLMs came along and everyone started using AI
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Andres Vera
Andres Vera
on linkedin
Mechanical Turk shuts down on September 30, and the way it died is the best AI parable of the year. — Jeff Bezos launched the service in 2005 and called it “artificial artificial intelligence.” …
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Lilly Irani
Lilly Irani
on linkedin
Mechanical Turk may be shutting down, but AI will always depend on data workers whose knowledge trains and tunes models. …