Amazon has told users that Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourced-work platform launched in 2005, will close on September 30, 20261,2. The company described the move as the result of a routine evaluation: "Following an assessment, Amazon made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026," the customer notice stated, adding that "We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments".
AWS had already stopped accepting new customer registrations on July 30, 2026, and closed the related services SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI to new users on the same date. Existing customers now have roughly five weeks before the cutoff.
Jeff Bezos once described Mechanical Turk as "artificial artificial intelligence". The platform handled what Amazon called Human Intelligence Tasks: audio transcription, image captioning, and data labeling, work that was straightforward for people but difficult for software at the time. Workers were paid a few cents per task; one worker cited an average of around 20 cents.
The platform's relevance eroded as the AI models it helped train grew capable enough to perform the same work. In 2023, TechCrunch reported on an EPFL study estimating that 33 to 46 percent of surveyed Mechanical Turk workers were completing text tasks using large language models such as ChatGPT.
ANALYSIS The closure marks a concrete endpoint for a service that once embodied the gap between human cognition and machine capability. That gap narrowed to the point where the humans hired through the platform were themselves outsourcing to AI, undermining the service's core value proposition.
The July 30 registration freeze and the simultaneous closure of related annotation services to new users point to a coordinated wind-down, not just a single legacy product retirement.
Amazon directed customers to a FAQ page to prepare for the closure. CNBC first reported the customer email.