The notice is one sentence long. "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close Amazon Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026," reads the banner on mturk.com, pointing workers and requesters to a FAQ. No reason is given, no successor is named, and the closure follows Amazon's decision in July to stop accepting new customers.
Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 and gave the industry a vocabulary. Work was posted as Human Intelligence Tasks, HITs, paid by the piece: labelling images, transcribing audio, filling surveys, moderating content, judging whether two product listings were the same thing. Jeff Bezos called it "artificial artificial intelligence," a joke that named the arrangement exactly, since the service existed to put people behind an API where software was not good enough yet. Two decades of machine learning research ran on that API, and so did an enormous amount of the labelled data that trained the first generation of large models.
More than 500,000 workers have used the platform, TechRepublic reports, and Krista Pawloski of the worker advocacy group Turkopticon says insurance and travel companies still route data work through it. Where those workers and that work go is unstated: Amazon names no replacement, and the market has moved to Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific, which sell vetted and specialised annotators rather than an open pool. There is one more twist that belongs in the obituary. A 2023 study cited by TechRepublic estimated that roughly 46 percent of Mechanical Turk workers were themselves using AI models to complete the tasks they had been hired to do, which is either the beginning of the end of the business or its logical conclusion.
For anyone building on human feedback today, the lesson is not nostalgia, it is procurement. The cheap, anonymous, high-volume tier of human judgment is closing, and what replaces it is more expensive, more specialised and more auditable, which is probably better for data quality and definitely worse for anyone who budgeted the old way. If your pipeline still assumes a marketplace of anonymous workers at pennies per task, you have until September 30 to find out what it costs to replace them.