Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, its long-running crowdsourcing platform that connected businesses and researchers with people willing to complete small online tasks, bringing the service to an end after more than two decades.
AWS says Mechanical Turk will permanently close on September 30, 2026. The platform will no longer be available to either workers or requesters after that date.
Amazon’s notice to Mechanical Turk users says the company regularly evaluates its programmes, tools and services and makes changes based on those assessments.
“Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk,” the company said, with the closure taking effect on September 30, 2026.
AWS’s own documentation now confirms the date, stating that Amazon Mechanical Turk will permanently close on September 30. Amazon is advising customers that currently use the service to review alternatives and make arrangements ahead of the shutdown.
Until the closure date, existing requesters can continue to publish tasks and workers can continue completing them, according to an Amazon notice reproduced by users of the platform.
Mechanical Turk was launched in November 2005.
Its premise was unusual for a technology company: instead of asking a computer to complete a task for a person, software could send a task to a human being.
The platform allowed businesses, researchers and developers to post what Amazon called Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs. These could include data labelling, transcription, research, surveys, image classification and other activities that required human judgement.
Amazon’s original announcement explained that humans still significantly outperformed computers at some seemingly simple tasks, such as identifying objects in photographs. Mechanical Turk was designed to make it possible for software to send those tasks to people and receive the results back.
The service’s name was borrowed from the 18th-century Mechanical Turk, a famous chess-playing machine that appeared to operate automatically but was ultimately revealed to have a human chess player hidden inside it.
The analogy was deliberate. Amazon’s digital Mechanical Turk similarly placed human labour behind computer processes.
The phrase associated with Mechanical Turk came from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Bezos described the concept as “artificial artificial intelligence” because the system allowed computers to call on humans to perform tasks that were difficult for machines but relatively straightforward for people.
The idea was effectively an inversion of the conventional relationship between people and computers: rather than a human asking a computer to calculate something, a computer could ask a human to carry out a task and return the answer.
Amazon used that description in its original 2005 announcement of the service.
The concept later became an important part of discussions around crowdsourcing, online labour and the human work supporting digital technologies.
The full shutdown follows an earlier change to Mechanical Turk.
Amazon stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers in July 2026. That move was widely interpreted by workers and users as a possible indication that the service’s future was uncertain.
However, the July change was not itself a complete shutdown. Existing users could continue using Mechanical Turk.
The new announcement is different: Amazon has now set a definite date for the complete closure of the platform.
Mechanical Turk workers and the organisations that use the platform have until September 30 to complete their remaining activity on the service.
Amazon’s notice tells workers to check their payment preferences and ensure that their accounts are configured correctly. Requesters are also being asked to make sure their payment information is up to date, including for the processing of refunds.
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After September 30, Mechanical Turk will no longer be available to workers or requesters.
Mechanical Turk occupies a distinctive place in the history of Amazon and online work.
When it launched in 2005, Amazon was proposing a system in which software could make use of a distributed human workforce almost as though it were another computing resource.
More than two decades later, the technology landscape is very different.
Artificial intelligence systems have advanced dramatically since Mechanical Turk’s launch, while a growing ecosystem of companies now provides data labelling, evaluation and other services connected to AI development.
Some recent reporting has linked Mechanical Turk’s decline to these changes and to increased competition in the data-labelling market. However, Amazon itself has not said that advances in artificial intelligence are the reason for the shutdown. The company’s stated explanation is that it reviewed its programmes, tools and services and decided to close Mechanical Turk.
That distinction matters.
The closure is confirmed. The September 30 date is confirmed. The platform’s 2005 launch and its connection to Bezos’s “artificial artificial intelligence” description are also well documented.
But claims that Amazon is shutting Mechanical Turk specifically because AI has replaced the human workers would go beyond what Amazon has officially said.
For now, the confirmed story is simpler: after 21 years, Amazon is bringing Mechanical Turk to an end.
And with it, one of the company’s most unusual experiments in combining computers with human labour will disappear from AWS.
Mechanical Turk will close permanently on September 30, 2026.
