Amazon Is Shutting Down Mechanical Turk, the Human Workforce That Helped Train Modern AI

A 21-year marketplace closes

Amazon Web Services has confirmed that Mechanical Turk, its crowdsourced digital-labour platform, will shut down on September 30, 2026. Sister service SageMaker Ground Truth, used for data-labelling workflows, is closing alongside it. The company said the decision followed an internal review of its programs and services, without detailing further reasoning.

From "artificial artificial intelligence" to the AI training pipeline

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk let businesses post small digital jobs — officially "Human Intelligence Tasks" — covering everything from data labelling and audio or video transcription to survey completion. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once described the service as "artificial artificial intelligence," a nod to how it used human effort to complete tasks machines of the time could not. At its peak, the marketplace served more than 500,000 registered workers worldwide.

Why now

The platform's own workforce ended up supplying much of the labelled data that trained the first generation of modern machine-learning systems. Its closure comes as AI models have grown capable enough to handle many of those labelling tasks directly, and as a newer wave of specialised data-labelling and human-feedback startups — including Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific — has taken over the market for recruiting workers to train AI systems.

What happens to workers and clients

Amazon has not published a detailed transition plan for the platform's remaining workers or the businesses that still rely on it for micro-tasking. Clients have until the September 30 deadline to wind down active projects on the platform.