Amazon will permanently close Amazon Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourced labor marketplace it has operated since 2005, on September 30, 2026. The official explanation is that the decision followed a routine assessment of the company's programs and services. While the usual narrative is that AI is taking over human work, here it is the human-powered system that trained the AI that is closing up shop first.

The Closure Reaches Beyond MTurk Itself

The official Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website carries a notice stating that the service will permanently close on September 30, 2026. The closure is not limited to MTurk alone. It also applies to SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI. As of September 30, the Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker type will no longer be available when creating labeling jobs or human review workflows. In effect, the entire path for handling human annotation of training data inside AWS is shutting at once.

Key Dates for Workers and Requesters

Several deadlines around the closure have been published.

HIT submissions close on September 30, and any HITs left unsubmitted will expire automatically. Requesters have 30 days after the closure, meaning through October 30, to approve or reject HITs completed in that window. Anything left untouched is auto-approved. Bonuses to workers can also be awarded until October 30. Requesters holding a pre-paid balance should expect a full refund within 30 days.

Workers are advised to confirm in the Worker Portal that a payment method and a transfer schedule are in place. Approved HITs will be paid out on the existing disbursement schedule, and tax documents will still be distributed through the established processes and deadlines. Transaction history remains accessible until January 28, 2027. Not everything disappears on the day of closure, but anyone who wants records on hand should act before the end of the year.

Where the "Artificial Artificial Intelligence" Name Came From

The service takes its name from the chess-playing automaton built in 1769 by the Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen. A life-sized wooden mannequin in a turban and a fur-trimmed robe, the Turk toured Europe and confounded opponents including Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. Kempelen would slide open the cabinet doors to reveal gears and springs, convincing audiences that the machine was making its own decisions. Hidden inside was a chess master.

Amazon carried that story straight into the product name. Founder Jeff Bezos described MTurk as artificial artificial intelligence. Tasks that a child can handle but a computer struggles with, such as deciding whether a photo contains a person, get handed to humans through something that reads almost exactly like an API call. The pseudo code in the official documentation is just as blunt: read the photo, then call callMechanicalTurk().

Jobs Worth a Few Cents, and More Than 500,000 Workers

Work on MTurk is broken into Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs, covering data labeling, audio and video transcription, and survey responses. Most pay a few cents (roughly a few hundred yen per hundred tasks) apiece. According to Amazon, the platform served more than 500,000 workers at its peak. They are known as turkers.

To take part, a worker must be at least 18 years old and have a computing device connected to the internet. The list of countries and regions accepted for registration includes Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Australia, and earnings were transferred to a virtual US bank account or to an Amazon.com gift card balance.

※1 USD = 159 JPY (as of August 26, 2026)

Outpaced by AI, With Data Quality in Question Too

Krista Pawloski, a data worker and an organizer with the worker advocacy group Turkopticon, has said MTurk had been in decline in recent years. AI models advanced quickly, while data startups such as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific entered the market and began recruiting workers to train those models. As Amazon put fewer resources into improving MTurk, Pawloski said, turkers drifted to competing platforms.

The irony is that AI was also eroding quality on the platform. A 2023 study by researchers in Switzerland estimated that up to 46 percent of MTurk workers were using AI models to complete tasks. A marketplace built to buy human judgment was quietly absorbing machine output. For a service whose entire value proposition was that the work is human, that undercuts the foundation.

Amazon had already said in July that it would stop accepting new customers, which many workers read as a signal that the end was near. Even so, some insurance and travel companies still rely on MTurk for data work and are now scrambling for alternative platforms. Amazon spokesperson Montana MacLachlan said the company remains focused on delivering the best possible experience for all its Amazon and AWS customers.

Summary

Amazon Mechanical Turk closes on September 30, 2026, and SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI shut down on the same date. Requesters can approve work and award bonuses through October 30, and transaction history stays available until January 28, 2027. A human marketplace that helped train modern AI is being retired after 21 years, pushed out by that same AI and by the specialist startups that followed it. The name artificial artificial intelligence lands a little differently on the way out.