The news
Amazon (AMZN) set September 30, 2026, as the permanent closing date for Mechanical Turk, its 21-year-old marketplace that paid people small sums for tasks such as labeling data and answering surveys. The Amazon Mechanical Turk shutdown also reaches into Amazon Web Services' AI tools.
A notice on the Mechanical Turk website, reported by CNBC on August 25, says Amazon regularly evaluates its programs and decided to close the service after an assessment. The notice gives no further reason. The requester site says all task creation and task completion end on September 30, and any tasks not yet submitted by then expire automatically. Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan told CNBC the company remains focused on giving Amazon and AWS customers the best possible experience.
The wind-down began earlier. TechCrunch reported on July 5 that an Amazon notice said the service would close to new customers on July 30, 2026, and that AWS did not plan to add new features.
For companies, the least visible change may matter most. Amazon's closure FAQ says the shutdown also applies to SageMaker Ground Truth, AWS's data labeling service, and Amazon Augmented AI, which routes model output to human reviewers. As of September 30, the Mechanical Turk worker type is no longer available when creating labeling jobs or human review workflows.
Amazon's FAQ lays out the remaining deadlines. Requesters have 30 days, until October 30, 2026, to approve or reject submitted work, after which unreviewed work is approved automatically, and they can award bonuses until the same date. Prepaid requester balances should be refunded within 30 days, workers are paid for completed and approved tasks on their normal schedule, and transaction history remains available until January 28, 2027.
Mechanical Turk launched in 2005. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called it "artificial artificial intelligence," CNBC reported, because it farmed out tasks that humans could do easily but computers could not. Tasks typically paid a few cents each, and the platform at one point served more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon as cited by CNBC.
The numbers
- Permanent closing date
- September 30, 2026
- Closed to new customers
- July 30, 2026
- Deadline to approve work and pay bonuses
- October 30, 2026
- Transaction history available until
- January 28, 2027
- Workers served at one point
- More than 500,000 (per Amazon, via CNBC)
- Year launched
- 2005
Why CEOs should care
AI and machine learning leaders should check every SageMaker Ground Truth labeling job and Augmented AI review workflow that names the Mechanical Turk worker type. Those setups stop working as of September 30, so teams need another workforce option or an outside labeling vendor, plus a fresh round of quality checks, since a new pool of workers can change label accuracy and turnaround times.
Research, survey and operations teams face a similar move. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with the worker advocacy group Turkopticon, told CNBC that some insurance and travel companies still rely on Mechanical Turk and are scrambling for alternatives. Anyone running long-term studies should expect sample changes when switching platforms and document the break so results stay comparable.
Finance and procurement teams have their own checklist: approve or reject outstanding work before October 30 to avoid paying for unreviewed tasks, confirm prepaid balances come back, and export transaction history before January 28, 2027 for audit and tax records. It is also worth asking suppliers whether any of their data or AI services quietly depended on Mechanical Turk workers.
The bigger picture
Mechanical Turk helped define a model in which people complete tiny online tasks that software cannot handle alone. TechCrunch noted Amazon began pitching it in 2018 as a way to annotate data for training neural networks through SageMaker. But the market moved: CNBC reported that data startups such as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific now recruit workers to train AI models, and Pawloski said Amazon seemed to invest less in the platform as rivals arrived.
Data quality also became a concern. TechCrunch cited a 2023 analysis that found between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete tasks, raising doubts about data that was supposed to come from humans.
What’s next
The next hard deadline is October 30, 2026, when requesters lose the ability to approve work or send bonuses. Transaction records remain accessible until January 28, 2027. Watch for AWS documentation updates on replacement workforce options inside SageMaker, and for rival platforms courting former Mechanical Turk requesters and workers.
What “Fact-checked” means
Fact-checking means testing a story’s facts against the evidence before it is published. This story went through at least two separate checks before this version was published.
- What we checked
- Its names, figures, dates, job titles, quotes and who said what were checked against the story’s sources, including its main source where it could be opened. The headline was checked for accuracy and overstatement.
- How
- A first check reviewed the whole story. If it passed, a second, skeptical check went back to the sources to look for mistakes in the most important facts. If a check flagged the story, it was edited to fix the problems found, and a separate re-check then reviewed the whole story again.
- Who
- The checks are made by our newsroom, as steps kept separate from the writing, under rules set by our editor, Hussein Mukhtar. A story the checks still flag is held for the editor, who decides whether it is fixed, published or dropped.
- If something is wrong
- “Fact-checked” does not mean error-free. If a material error is found after publication, we correct the story and add a note saying what changed. Report an error
Companies in this story
