Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk after 21 years, quietly ending the human-powered platform

Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, after 21 years, ending one of the internet’s earliest marketplaces for invisible digital labor—as well as a platform that helped establish the human-data pipeline behind modern AI. The company said Mechanical Turk will close on September 30, 2026, after an internal assessment.  Amazon had already stopped accepting new customers on July 30. The service launched in 2005 and connected businesses and researchers with workers who completed small…