Amazon to Shut Down MTurk Service

Amazon announced that it will shut down the crowdsourcing work platform AWS Mechanical Turk, which has been in operation since 2005, on September 30, 2026. According to a customer email first reported by CNBC, Amazon stated that the decision was made following a regular program review.

New customer sign-ups were halted starting July 30, 2026, and new registrations for related services such as SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI were also blocked on the same day. Existing customers were given a grace period of about five weeks.

The service was a platform for performing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as audio transcription, image captioning, and data labeling, and has played a key role in training AI models. However, as the performance of AI models like LLMs has improved, allowing machines to replace tasks previously performed by humans, the need for the service has decreased. In fact, a 2023 EPFL study found that 33-46% of surveyed workers were already using LLMs to automate their tasks.