Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk today, closing the crowdsourced labor marketplace that spent 21 years paying people small sums to do small digital tasks — and that quietly trained a generation of the machine-learning systems now doing many of those tasks itself.
The platform, which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once called "artificial artificial intelligence," launched in 2005 and at its peak had more than 500,000 registered workers completing "HITs" — Human Intelligence Tasks — such as labeling images, transcribing audio and answering survey questions for a few cents apiece, according to The Next Web. Amazon said it made the decision to close the service after an internal review of its programs, without detailing what prompted the review.
Displaced by the Industry It Helped Build
The closure caps a slow decline that tracked the rise of the AI industry Mechanical Turk's workers helped create. A wave of newer data-labeling startups, including Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific, have taken over much of the market for recruiting workers to train AI models, typically offering more structured pay and more specialized tasks than Mechanical Turk's open marketplace, according to TechSpot. A 2023 study cited in coverage of the shutdown found that as many as 46% of Mechanical Turk workers were already using generative AI tools to complete the very tasks they were being paid to do by hand — a sign, researchers said, that the platform's human workforce was being quietly automated from within even before Amazon made the shutdown official.
Krista Pawloski of the worker-advocacy group Turkopticon, which has tracked Mechanical Turk for years, said the platform had been "in decline for years," with Amazon investing fewer resources into it as rival platforms expanded.
Amazon stopped accepting new worker sign-ups on July 30. Under the wind-down timeline, "requesters" — the companies and researchers who post tasks — have until October 30 to review and approve or reject work that was already submitted; any submitted task not reviewed by that date will be automatically approved and paid. Workers' transaction and payment history will remain accessible on the site until January 28, 2027, after which the platform will go dark entirely.
The shutdown has drawn attention from labor researchers who spent years studying Mechanical Turk as a proving ground for questions about gig work, algorithmic management and fair pay that later spread to ride-hailing and delivery apps. Much of the AI industry's earliest training data — the labeled examples used to teach image-recognition and language systems what a cat or a comma looks like — passed through Mechanical Turk's workforce at some point, even though few of those systems credit the human labor behind them.
Amazon has not said whether it will offer a replacement service or point former Mechanical Turk requesters toward a specific competitor, and the company's help pages direct remaining users only to the October and January deadlines for retrieving their data.
