AWS is shutting down Mechanical Turk, which let humans beat AI at certain
work tasks

Date:
Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:05:00 +0000

Description:
Amazon will close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending a 21-year platform that connected businesses with hundreds of thousands of workers.

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Amazon will permanently close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026 Mechanical Turk once connected more
than 500,000 workers with paid tasks Workers completed image tagging, transcription, surveys, and other routine assignments Amazon plans to permanently close Mechanical Turk, its long-running platform for outsourcing small tasks to human workers.

Launched in 2005, the platform enabled companies to hire people to complete small, routine tasks that computers could not easily handle at the time. Jeff Bezos once summarized the concept with a phrase that stuck: "artificial artificial intelligence," in remarks about the platform. Latest Videos From TechRadar Watch full video here: A tool built to outsmart the limits of early computers We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments, a notice on the Mechanical Turk website said.

Following an assessment, weve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026. You may like Meta thought AI could do the job instead of humans what happened next should surprise absolutely nobody Starbucks abandons AI inventory tool after only nine months following
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The platform's original name referenced a historical automaton that appeared to play chess but was secretly guided by a hidden human operator.

Amazon initially built Mechanical Turk to help label the enormous volume of product data listed across its own retail website. Are you a pro? Subscribe
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At its peak, the service reportedly connected more than 500,000 workers,
known informally as turkers, to available paid tasks online.

Workers typically earned only a few cents per task, completing jobs like tagging photos, converting speech into text, or filling out surveys.

Amazon later marketed that same workforce as a convenient data annotation source to support its own SageMaker machine learning service. What to read next Sam Altman thinks that we just love to work, which is why AI won't cause a shorter working week How to address the white-collar exodus Microsoft
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Rapid AI growth left the human workforce behind Krista Pawloski, an organizer with the worker advocacy group Turkopticon, said the platform had clearly
been declining for several years now.

She said Amazon appeared to spend less on maintaining the platform just as several newer competitors entered the market rapidly.

Companies including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have since emerged to recruit workers specifically for training a wide range of newer AI models.

Researchers based in Switzerland published a 2023 study reporting that 46% of surveyed workers had relied on AI systems while finishing assigned jobs.

Amazon disclosed one month earlier that it would no longer accept new customers, a move workers quietly read as an early warning sign.

Certain firms in insurance and travel sectors continue relying on this workforce and are now hurriedly searching for replacement services.

Theres some people that still pretty much still do it full time, said Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon. Theyre concerned now.

Although Mechanical Turk is going down, the company claims to remain
committed to serving both its Amazon and AWS customer base well.

[Amazon is] focused on delivering the best possible experience for all our Amazon and AWS customers, said Amazons spokesperson Montana MacLachlan.

The platform's decline says as much about shifting AI economics as it does about Amazon's own waning commitment to it.

A service once built to prove humans could out-think machines is closing just as AI tools increasingly outcompete many of those same humans.

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