Amazon Mechanical Turk closes permanently on 30 September 2026, ending a 21-year run. AWS stopped taking new customers on 30 July 2026 and announced the full shutdown on 25 August 2026. Amazon gave no reason beyond a routine assessment of its programs, tools and services.
The Closure Timeline, Date by Date
Mechanical Turk shuts in stages, and the final stage runs into January 2027.
The dates below come from the closure notice on the Mechanical Turk website and the FAQ page it links to. Most news coverage stopped at the September date and skipped everything after it, which is the part that decides whether people get paid.
| Date | What Happens |
|---|---|
| 30 July 2026 | AWS stops accepting new Mechanical Turk customers. |
| 25 August 2026 | Amazon announces the full closure. |
| 30 September 2026 | The platform closes. HIT submissions end and every unsubmitted HIT expires automatically. |
| 30 October 2026 | The 30-day approval window ends. Requesters can approve, reject or pay bonuses until this date; anything left unactioned is auto-approved. |
| 28 January 2027 | Transaction history stops being available. |
Requesters are told to expect a full refund of their remaining account balance within 30 days of closure.
Why Did Amazon Close Mechanical Turk?
Amazon has not given a specific reason, and it is worth being precise about that.
The only official explanation is a single sentence in the closure notice: “We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments. Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close Amazon Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.” That is the whole of it. There is no cited cause, no successor product and no transition programme.
Reporting since the announcement has filled the gap with three explanations that are documented independently of Amazon: the platform had been losing ground to newer data-labelling companies, Amazon had put little visible development into it for years, and the kind of small judgement task it was built for is increasingly done by software.
Did AI Kill Mechanical Turk, or Did Amazon Let It Fade?
Both, and the order matters more than most coverage allows.
The AI story has a concrete data point behind it. A 2023 study by researchers at EPFL in Switzerland, titled Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence, re-ran an abstract-summarisation task on Mechanical Turk and used keystroke detection and synthetic-text classification to estimate that between 33 and 46 percent of the crowd workers had used large language models to produce their answers. For a marketplace whose entire value was human judgement, that finding was corrosive.
The competitive story is separate. Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific built businesses recruiting workers specifically for AI training and evaluation, and they paid better for narrower, verified skills. Requesters who wanted reliable labels followed the money and the vetting.
What deserves a hedge is the causal claim itself. Amazon never said AI ended Mechanical Turk, and the platform’s decline was visible before ChatGPT existed. The honest version is that a service Amazon had stopped developing was overtaken by companies built for the current AI market, and the generative-AI wave made its weakest point — unverifiable human effort — impossible to ignore.
What Mechanical Turk Was, and Why It Carried That Name
Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where businesses posted small digital jobs and a global pool of workers completed them for a few cents each.
Amazon launched it in November 2005. The jobs were called Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, and they covered work that was trivial for a person and hard for software of the era: labelling images, transcribing audio, categorising products, moderating content, checking listings and filling in surveys. Requesters posted the work; the people who did it became known as turkers.
It began as an internal fix. Amazon needed people to clean up the product data on its own retail site, where duplicate and mislabelled listings were beyond what its software could sort out, and the underlying idea was set down by Amazon engineer Venky Harinarayan in a patent disclosure filed in 2001. Opening that internal tool to outside businesses turned a housekeeping problem into a product, and for several years it had no serious competition.
The name is a deliberate joke about the whole arrangement. The original Mechanical Turk was a chess-playing automaton built by the Hungarian engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen in the eighteenth century, which astonished audiences across Europe until it emerged that a human chess player was concealed inside the cabinet. Jeff Bezos described Amazon’s version as “artificial artificial intelligence” — software that looks automated with people hidden behind the interface.
Scale peaked early. Amazon reported more than 500,000 registered workers from over 190 countries in January 2011. Pay stayed low throughout: a 2018 study presented at the CHI conference, which tracked 2,676 workers across 3.8 million tasks, found a median effective wage of about two dollars an hour, with only 4 percent of workers clearing the United States federal minimum of $7.25. Those numbers are a large part of why the platform drew sustained criticism from labour researchers and from Turkopticon, the worker-led advocacy group that formed around it.
What Workers Need to Do Before 30 September 2026
Workers should submit outstanding HITs before 30 September and confirm their payment details in the Worker Portal now.
Four things follow from the published FAQ:
- Any HIT not submitted by 30 September 2026 expires. Unsubmitted work is not paid.
- Requesters have until 30 October 2026 to approve or reject submitted work. Anything they leave alone is auto-approved, so unreviewed work is not lost.
- Payments go out on each worker’s existing payment schedule, not in a single closing settlement, which is why the payment method and transfer schedule in the Worker Portal need to be correct before the platform goes.
- Transaction history and tax documentation remain reachable until 28 January 2027. Anyone who needs earnings records for tax filing should download them well before that date.
The people most affected are not a uniform group. Writing for Tech Policy Press after the announcement, Krystal Kauffman, an organiser with Turkopticon and a researcher on the Distributed AI Research Institute’s Data Workers’ Inquiry project, described a workforce that included single parents, carers and people with disabilities who needed work they could do from home on their own hours. Kauffman began turking in 2015 after an illness left her unable to work outside the house, at a point when remote work was still uncommon.
Amazon has not announced severance, transition support or a replacement platform for workers. That absence is the single biggest difference between how this closure was reported and how it is being experienced, and it echoes a pattern seen across the wave of big tech job cuts driven by AI and automation.
What Requesters Get Back, and When
Requesters get a full refund of their remaining balance within 30 days of the 30 September closure.
The approval mechanics matter for budgeting. Work submitted before closure sits in the standard 30-day approval window that ends 30 October 2026, and any HIT a requester neither approves nor rejects is approved automatically and charged. Bonuses can also be paid up to that date, so anything owed informally to a good worker has a deadline attached to it.
Teams that used Mechanical Turk for longitudinal research or for training-data provenance should export their result files and transaction records before 28 January 2027. After that the history is gone from the console.
What the Closure Breaks Elsewhere in AWS
The shutdown removes the Mechanical Turk worker type from Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth.
From 30 September 2026 that worker option is no longer available for labelling jobs or human-review workflows, so any Ground Truth pipeline that routed tasks to the public Mechanical Turk crowd stops working on the same day the marketplace does. Teams using it need to move to a private or vendor workforce.
The quieter loss is in research. Two decades of academic work in psychology, linguistics, economics and machine learning ran participant recruitment through Mechanical Turk, and widely used training sets — the SQuAD question-answering dataset among them — were annotated by turkers. The published papers survive. What ends is the cheap, standing recruitment channel that made a great deal of that work practical, at a moment when Amazon has been retiring several long-running services.
Where Mechanical Turk Work Has Gone Instead
The work split into two markets, and neither of them looks much like Mechanical Turk.
At one end, research and survey recruitment moved to platforms that verify who their participants are, with Prolific and CloudResearch both positioning themselves directly as Mechanical Turk replacements for academics. At the other, AI training and evaluation went to companies such as Scale AI and Mercor, which recruit for specific expertise rather than for volume. General microtask sites including Clickworker and Toloka still take on the high-volume, low-value end.
The through-line is verification. The thing that made Mechanical Turk useful in 2005 — anonymous, instantly available, effectively unlimited human attention — is the thing buyers now refuse to pay for, because they cannot tell whether a person or a model did the work.
Where Mechanical Turk Stands as of 8 September 2026
As of 8 September 2026 the platform is still running, with 22 days left before it closes.
The Mechanical Turk homepage carries the closure notice and points workers and requesters to the FAQ. New customers cannot sign up. Amazon has made no further public statement since the 25 August announcement, has not named a successor service and has not indicated that the decision is under review. The 30 September date should be treated as firm.
Frequently Asked Questions
When Does Amazon Mechanical Turk Shut Down?
Amazon Mechanical Turk closes permanently on 30 September 2026. HIT submissions end that day and all unsubmitted HITs expire automatically.
Will Workers Still Be Paid After the Shutdown?
Yes. Completed and approved HITs are paid out on each worker’s existing payment schedule, and requesters have until 30 October 2026 to approve or reject submitted work, after which anything unactioned is auto-approved.
Why Did Amazon Shut Down Mechanical Turk?
Amazon gave no specific reason, saying only that it had made the decision following an assessment of its programs, tools and services. Reporting points to competition from newer data-labelling firms, years of minimal investment, and AI absorbing the simple tasks the platform was built for.
What Can Requesters Use Instead of Mechanical Turk?
Coverage of the closure names Prolific and CloudResearch for research and survey recruitment, Scale AI and Mercor for AI training and evaluation, and Clickworker and Toloka for general microtasks. The right choice depends on whether the task needs verified participants or raw volume.
Does the Closure Affect Other AWS Services?
Yes. The Mechanical Turk worker type is removed from Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth on 30 September 2026, so labelling jobs and human-review workflows that used the public crowd must move to a private or vendor workforce.
How Long Will Mechanical Turk Data Stay Available?
Transaction history remains accessible until 28 January 2027. Workers and requesters who need earnings records, tax documents or result files should download them before that date.
