Launched in 2005 and with more than 500,000 workers at its peak, Amazon's human micro-task platform will cease all activity on September 30, 2026.
Amazon confirmed on Tuesday that it will close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, twenty-one years after it launched. The decision follows what the company describes as an internal review of its programs and services.
Opened in 2005, the marketplace allowed sponsors to publish small digital tasks — the "Human Intelligence Tasks" — ranging from data labeling to audio or video transcription, including filling out questionnaires. Jeff Bezos presented it as "artificial artificial intelligence": humans paid by the piece to accomplish what machines did not yet know how to do. More than 500,000 workers were registered at the height of its activity.
The service had been declining for several years, with Amazon devoting less and less resources to it while a new generation of data annotation specialists — Scale AI, Mercor, Prolific — captured the workforce by paying them better for training large models. The platform that provided some of the datasets for the first wave of machine learning is therefore disappearing just as the market it had opened up is reaching industrial maturity.
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