AWS is shutting down Mechanical Turk, which let humans beat AI at certain work tasks

• Amazon will permanently close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026
• Mechanical Turk once connected more than 500,000 workers with paid tasks
• Workers completed image tagging, transcription, surveys, and other routine assignments

Amazon plans to permanently close Mechanical Turk, its long-running platform for outsourcing small tasks to human workers.

Launched in 2005, the platform enabled companies to hire people to complete small, routine tasks that computers could not easily handle at the time.

Jeff Bezos once summarized the concept with a phrase that stuck: "artificial artificial intelligence," in remarks about the platform.

“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” a notice on the Mechanical Turk website said.

“Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.”

The platform's original name referenced a historical automaton that appeared to play chess but was secretly guided by a hidden human operator.

Amazon initially built Mechanical Turk to help label the enormous volume of product data listed across its own retail website.

At its peak, the service reportedly connected more than 500,000 workers, known informally as turkers, to available paid tasks online.

Workers typically earned only a few cents per task, completing jobs like tagging photos, converting speech into text, or filling out surveys.

Amazon later marketed that same workforce as a convenient data annotation source to support its own SageMaker machine learning service.

Rapid AI growth left the human workforce behind

Krista Pawloski, an organizer with the worker advocacy group Turkopticon, said the platform had clearly been declining for several years now.

She said Amazon appeared to spend less on maintaining the platform just as several newer competitors entered the market rapidly.

Companies including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have since emerged to recruit workers specifically for training a wide range of newer AI models.

Researchers based in Switzerland published a 2023 study reporting that 46% of surveyed workers had relied on AI systems while finishing assigned jobs.

Amazon disclosed one month earlier that it would no longer accept new customers, a move workers quietly read as an early warning sign.

Certain firms in insurance and travel sectors continue relying on this workforce and are now hurriedly searching for replacement services.

“There’s some people that still pretty much still do it full time,” said Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon. “They’re concerned now.”

Although Mechanical Turk is going down, the company claims to remain committed to serving both its Amazon and AWS customer base well.

“[Amazon is] focused on delivering the best possible experience for all our Amazon and AWS customers,” said Amazon’s spokesperson Montana MacLachlan.

The platform's decline says as much about shifting AI economics as it does about Amazon's own waning commitment to it.

A service once built to prove humans could out-think machines is closing just as AI tools increasingly outcompete many of those same humans.

Via CNBC

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