Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourced labor marketplace it launched in 2005, bringing a 21-year-old piece of internet infrastructure to a close on September 30. The company quietly stopped accepting new customers on July 30 and has since been winding the platform down, according to reporting on the closure. Amazon has not publicly detailed its reasoning, and has not named a successor product for the businesses and workers who relied on it.
Mechanical Turk connected companies and researchers with people willing to complete small, repetitive online jobs — known as "human intelligence tasks," or HITs — that often paid only a few cents apiece: labeling images, transcribing audio, verifying addresses, filling out surveys. Founder Jeff Bezos famously described it as "artificial artificial intelligence," a wry acknowledgment that the platform existed specifically to supply human judgment for tasks computers of the era could not reliably handle. At its peak, more than 500,000 workers used the marketplace, some relying on it as a primary source of income.
Automated out of its own niche
The shutdown reflects how thoroughly AI has eaten into the category of work Mechanical Turk was built to supply. Newer companies — including Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific — built venture-backed businesses specifically around sourcing human labor to train and evaluate large AI models, a more specialized and better-compensated version of the work MTurk pioneered. At the same time, the value of MTurk's own workforce eroded from within: a 2023 academic study found that as many as 46% of workers on the platform were themselves using AI tools to complete the very tasks they were being paid to do by hand, undermining the platform's original premise of unautomated human judgment.
The closure leaves both sides of the marketplace scrambling. Businesses that used MTurk for tasks such as insurance-claims review and travel-data verification have a little over a month to migrate to alternative platforms, according to Fast Company's account of the shutdown. Workers, many of whom used the flexible, pay-by-task structure as supplemental or full-time income, are losing that option outright, with no comparable low-barrier alternative from Amazon itself.
Mechanical Turk's demise is a small but telling data point in the AI economy: a platform built nearly two decades ago to paper over gaps in automated intelligence is being retired because automation, and a new generation of AI-training labor marketplaces, has made its particular niche obsolete.
