Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, after 21 years, ending one of the internet’s earliest marketplaces for invisible digital labor—as well as a platform that helped establish the human-data pipeline behind modern AI.
The company said Mechanical Turk will close on September 30 after an internal assessment.
Amazon had already stopped accepting new customers on July 30. The service launched in 2005 and connected businesses and researchers with workers who completed small online jobs, known as “human intelligence tasks,” or HITs, that often paid just a few cents each.
A marketplace for work that computers couldn’t do
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had called MTurk “artificial artificial intelligence,” a nod to how the service relied on people to handle simple digital tasks that computers still struggle to do, such as labeling images, transcribing audio, and sorting data. The name itself came from the Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century chess-playing machine that appeared automated but secretly relied on a human operator.
Over time, MTurk became part of the infrastructure for machine learning. Amazon still describes the platform as a way to collect and annotate large datasets, use human feedback to validate models, and retrain machine learning systems. At one point, the marketplace had more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon.
The human-AI loop got stronger
The type of work that defined MTurk has increasingly moved toward automation. At the same time, newer companies, including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific, have built businesses around sourcing human labor specifically for training advanced AI models.
Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with the advocacy group Turkopticon, told CNBC that MTurk had been declining for years as Amazon invested fewer resources in the platform and workers migrated elsewhere. Pawloski began “turking” in 2008 while on maternity leave and transitioned to it full time in 2012. She described platforms like MTurk as a source of “meaningful income” for people who need flexible, remote work.
Then came a particularly circular development. A 2023 analysis cited by TechCrunch found that an estimated 33% to 46% of MTurk workers in the study were using large language models to complete tasks. A system designed to supply human judgment for computers was, increasingly, just relaying answers that machines had already generated.
Amazon has not publicly tied the shutdown directly to advances in AI. Its notice says only that the decision followed an assessment of its services.
However, Amazon isn’t leaving the crowdsourced labor business entirely. Amazon Web Services (AWS) still offers SageMaker Ground Truth, its in-house data-labeling tool, as an alternative for customers who relied on MTurk. Some existing MTurk requesters, including insurance and travel companies, have continued using the platform right up to the shutdown notice, according to Pawloski.
