Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk and SageMaker Ground Truth on September 30, 2026, ending the 21 year old crowdsourcing platform that helped invent AI training data work, a market now run by Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific.
Read the full story: Amazon Is Shutting Down Mechanical Turk After 21 Years →
Transcript
Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk. September 30, 2026, after twenty one years. Jeff Bezos once called it artificial artificial intelligence, and that name aged well, because MTurk invented paying anonymous humans online to do the boring work AI needed: labeling, transcribing, answering surveys. At its peak, over half a million workers. So why kill it now? Amazon just says an internal review. But here's the real reason underneath it. A 2023 study found up to 46 percent of MTurk workers were using AI to do the human work. That wrecked its value as real human data. Meanwhile Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific quietly took over the entire market. MTurk built the playbook for humans in the loop. It just didn't get to keep playing.