Amazon to Shut Down Mechanical Turk, Its 20-Year-Old Crowdsourcing Marketplace, Sept. 30

Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk, the microtask marketplace that connected businesses with a distributed, on-demand human workforce, on September 30. Launched two decades ago, MTurk let requesters break large manual jobs into small ‘microtasks’—data validation, content moderation, deduplication, surveys, image categorization—and pay workers per task through a web interface or API.

The platform became a workhorse of early machine learning, cheaply supplying the human-labeled data needed to train models and support human-in-the-loop feedback loops. Users cited in Amazon’s own materials, including the Allen Institute for AI and food-industry analysts, relied on it for annotation tasks like drawing bounding boxes for computer vision and gathering structured data from websites and menus—work too ambiguous to fully automate yet too large for a fixed team.

The shutdown is notable given how much of the AI data-labeling pipeline MTurk helped establish. Its closure signals a shift in that market: dedicated annotation vendors and, increasingly, automated and LLM-assisted labeling have eroded the niche MTurk pioneered, and the many researchers and businesses still using it will need to migrate to alternatives before the deadline.