Amazon Web Services is permanently closing Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending a 21-year-old marketplace where businesses and researchers hired people for small data and AI-related tasks. Workers and requesters got a little more than a month to move elsewhere. AWS gave no specific reason.
New user registrations already stopped on July 30. Requesters keep a 30-day period after closure to approve submitted work and award bonuses.
Turkopticon organizer Krista Pawloski told CNBC the platform had been "in decline" as Amazon invested less while rival services gained ground. A 2023 Swiss study found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete tasks.