Amazon’s crowdsourced work platform Mechanical Turk to close in September

AMAZON AND AI. The Amazon logo is seen in this illustration taken February 16, 2025. Dado Ruvic/Reuters Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 as a service matching workers with simple digital jobs for them to do and be paid for MANILA, Philippines – Amazon announced this week that it would be closing Mechanical Turk, its crowdsourced work platform, on September 30. The announcement, posted atop the Mechanical Turk website, reads, “We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments. Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.” Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 as a service matching workers with simple digital jobs for them to do and be paid for. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos previously described Mechanical Turk as “artificial artificial intelligence,” allowing humans to do tasks too complicated for machines to do at the time, such as audio transcription or data labeling. While the service previously had a 500,000-strong group of workers, a CNBC report cited data worker Krista Pawloski, an organizer with Turkopticon, an employee advocacy group for data workers, that the service had been “in decline.” The advancements in artificial intelligence models and the arrival of similar competing services have lessened Mechanical Turk’s impact, with fewer resources allocated towards developing it until the announcement it was being shuttered. A frequently asked questions page has been setup to provide support for people who will be impacted by the upcoming closure. – Rappler.com How does this make you feel? Loading