Overview
- Amazon announced Wednesday that AWS Mechanical Turk will stop operating on Sept. 30, 2026 and that it stopped accepting new customers earlier this summer.
- The company framed the shutdown as the result of an internal assessment that will steer customers toward AWS tools such as SageMaker Ground Truth for human review and labeling.
- Reporting and worker organizers say MTurk had declined as advanced AI tools and specialized data-labeling startups siphoned work and investment away from the platform.
- Many turkers who relied on the site for flexible or meaningful income are now facing disruption and are searching for replacement platforms or clients.
- Researchers have raised data-quality concerns for MTurk: a 2023 Swiss study found that roughly one-third to nearly half of workers used AI to complete tasks, complicating the platform’s role in training models.