AMZ123 has learned that Amazon announced it will officially shut down Mechanical Turk (MTurk), its crowdsourcing work platform that has operated for 21 years, on September 30, 2026. Launched in 2005, the platform had more than 500,000 “Turkers” at its peak. It mainly broke down “human intelligence tasks” such as data annotation, audio and video transcription, and surveys, distributing them to remote workers who were paid a few cents per completed task. MTurk once handled Amazon’s own e-commerce data cleaning work and at one point attempted to integrate with SageMaker to expand AI training data services.

With the rise of professional data companies such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific, MTurk’s supply and demand were gradually diverted. A 2023 Swiss study pointed out that up to 46% of tasks may have been completed by workers using AI, raising doubts about the authenticity of data on the platform. Since July 2026, MTurk has stopped accepting new customers and plans to shut down completely on September 30. Some insurance and travel companies that still rely on the platform for manual review are being forced to urgently seek alternative service providers.

This exit reflects AWS’s adjustment of peripheral businesses and also signals that the traditional “cheap labor crowdsourcing” model is completing its transformation amid competition from AI-native data factories.

Source: AMZ123
Original link: https://www.amz123.com/kx/4Axz1q2e