MUMBAI: The Turk is taking its final turn. Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, its crowdsourced digital-work platform, on September 30, 2026, bringing the curtain down on a service that has operated for more than 20 years.
Amazon Web Services announced the decision on Tuesday through a notice on the Mechanical Turk website, saying it had reviewed its programmes, tools and services before deciding to discontinue AWS Mechanical Turk.
Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk connected businesses and other users with people willing to complete small online assignments known as Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs. These included data labelling, audio and video transcription and surveys, with workers often earning only a few cents for individual tasks.
The platform was built around an idea Jeff Bezos once described as “artificial artificial intelligence” — using humans for jobs that were relatively easy for people but difficult for computers. Its name came from an 18th-century chess-playing machine that appeared to operate autonomously but was actually controlled by a person hidden inside it.
Over its lifetime, Mechanical Turk grew to more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon. But the platform has faced increasing competition as AI and specialised data-work services have developed.
Platforms including Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific have emerged as alternatives for workers involved in training and evaluating AI systems. Mechanical Turk itself had increasingly been used for AI-related work, including human data labelling and review through Amazon’s SageMaker service.
For workers, however, the platform’s decline had already become visible. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organiser with Turkopticon, said Mechanical Turk had been losing momentum in recent years as Amazon appeared to devote fewer resources to improving the service.
Questions have also emerged around the quality of human-generated work on the platform as AI tools have become more accessible. A 2023 study by researchers in Switzerland found that as many as 46 per cent of surveyed Mechanical Turk workers used AI models while completing assignments.
Amazon had already stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers in July, signalling that the platform’s future could be coming to an end.
The shutdown could also leave businesses scrambling for replacements. Pawloski said some insurance and travel companies still rely on Mechanical Turk for data-related work and are now searching for alternatives.
What began in 2005 as an unusual experiment in combining human judgement with computing is therefore ending at a very different moment, one in which AI is increasingly capable of doing the very tasks that once made Mechanical Turk’s human workforce indispensable.
