Amazon Shuts Down Mechanical Turk Amid AI Advances and Competition

Amazon is shutting down its crowdsourced work platform, Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026. Launched in 2005, MTurk matches workers with simple digital jobs that pay out a few cents per task. The service was originally conceived to assist with labeling data on Amazon's webstore and was named after the 18th century chess-playing robot that was actually controlled by a human.

The platform at one point served over 500,000 workers, but has been in decline due to advancements in AI models and the entry of competing platforms such as Scale AI and Prolific. Amazon's decision to close MTurk has left some workers scrambling to find alternative platforms, including insurance and travel companies that still depend on MTurk for data workers.

Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, an employee advocacy group for data workers, said Amazon seemed to invest fewer resources into improving MTurk at the same time as more data labeling services arrived. This caused many turkers to shift to competing platforms, she added.