Amazon Shuts Down Mechanical Turk After 21 Years as the AI Era Leaves It Behind

Amazon is fully shutting down its Mechanical Turk platform (MTurk for short) after 21 years of operation. The move closes the book on one of the internet's oldest "invisible digital labor" marketplaces — a platform that helped build the human-data infrastructure underlying modern AI. According to the company, following an internal review, MTurk will shut down completely on September 30; new customer sign-ups were already halted as of July 30.

Launched in 2005, the service connected companies and researchers with workers through small tasks called "human intelligence tasks" (HITs) — often paying just a few cents each. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once called MTurk "artificial artificial intelligence," a nod to the fact that simple digital tasks computers still struggle with — image labeling, audio transcription, data sorting — were being done by people. The platform's name itself referenced the 18th-century "Mechanical Turk," a chess-playing machine that appeared fully automated but was secretly operated by a hidden human.

Over time, MTurk became part of the machine-learning infrastructure: Amazon describes the platform as a tool for collecting and labeling large datasets, validating models through human feedback, and retraining machine-learning systems. At its peak, the company says, the platform had more than 500,000 registered workers.

But the type of work MTurk specialized in has increasingly shifted toward automation. Meanwhile, newer companies — Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific — have built businesses specifically around sourcing human labor to train advanced AI models. Krista Pawloski, a Turkopticon activist and data professional, told CNBC that MTurk had been fading for years as Amazon devoted fewer resources to the platform and workers migrated elsewhere. Pawloski started "turking" in 2008 while on parental leave and transitioned to it full-time in 2012 — she describes such platforms as a source of "meaningful income" for people who need flexible, remote work.

MTurk's shutdown isn't just the end of one service — it marks the close of an entire generation of the digital-labor market, where cheap, piecemeal human work laid the foundation for training today's AI models. That role is now being taken over by newer, more specialized companies focused on high-quality data — a sign of just how quickly the AI data supply chain is professionalizing for business.