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 ass

The 21-year-old platform matched workers with small digital tasks and once served more than 500,000 workers

Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 as a service matching workers with simple digital jobs for them to do and be paid for