Amazon closes Mechanical Turk after 21 years

The service Jeff Bezos called “artificial artificial intelligence” is being closed by the real thing.

What is closing

Amazon posted a banner on August 26 confirming that AWS Mechanical Turk permanently closes on September 30, 2026, 21 years after it launched. The platform had already stopped taking new customers in July. MTurk existed to do the work computers could not: labeling images, transcribing audio, sorting messy data, split into tiny “human intelligence tasks” that often paid a few cents each. Amazon’s own documentation counted more than 500,000 workers across 190 countries. The name came from the 18th century chess automaton that appeared to play by itself and had a person hidden in the cabinet.

Squeezed from both ends

The gap the platform was built to cover has closed from both directions. Newer companies like Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific took the specialized human data work that trains frontier models. And a 2023 academic study found up to 46 percent of surveyed MTurk workers may have been running their tasks through AI tools themselves.

That last figure matters to anyone who buys or produces training data. The platform did not simply lose customers to automation; the humans inside it had already been partly replaced from the inside, which quietly undermined the one thing being paid for, a human answer. “We used human annotators” is a quality claim that now needs proof, because for years the marketplace built on that promise could not provide it.