Amazon is shutting down its 21-year-old platform that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos described as ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ at its launch in 2005
Amazon has announced that it will shut down its crowdsourced work platform Mechanical Truk, effective September 30, 2026, as reported by CNBC. Launched in the year 2025, the service was described by founder Jeff Bezos has ‘artificial artificial intelligence’, outsourcing simple digital tasks to humans that computers struggled to complete. The platform managed to connect hundreds of thousands of workers, known as ‘trukers’, to small jobs such as labelling data, transcribing audio, or answering surveys. At its peak, the platform served more than 500,000 workers. But with the rise of advanced AI models and competing data-labeling startups like Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific, MTurk had been in decline.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ ‘artificial artificial intelligence’
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos famously described the service as “artificial artificial intelligence,” a nod to how it used human labor to complete tasks that machines of the era simply couldn’t manage on their own. The platform’s name is a reference to the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that appeared to operate autonomously but was secretly controlled by a hidden human chess master. Amazon reportedly first conceived of the platform to help label the vast troves of data generated by its own online store.
From half a million workers to a platform ‘in decline’
At its peak, Mechanical Turk served more than 500,000 workers, often referred to as “turkers.” But the platform’s fortunes have shifted dramatically in recent years. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon — an advocacy group for data workers — said MTurk had been in decline as the broader AI training landscape moved on without it. Since the platform’s 2005 launch, AI models have advanced enormously, and a new wave of specialized data-labeling startups, including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific, have emerged to recruit workers for AI model training, pulling volume away from Amazon’s original platform.
Amazon’s later pivot toward AI training data
As demand for AI training data grew, Amazon tried to reposition Mechanical Turk as a data-annotation source for its SageMaker machine learning service, marketing the platform’s round-the-clock worker availability as a way to get fast turnaround on human review and labeling tasks. But Pawloski said Amazon appeared to invest fewer resources into improving the platform even as competition intensified, prompting many turkers to migrate to rival services instead.
Questions about data quality
The platform’s reliability has also faced scrutiny. A 2023 academic study out of Switzerland found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers were using AI models themselves to complete supposedly human-generated tasks — a finding that complicates the value of MTurk-sourced data for training AI systems that are, in some cases, being used to generate that very data.
A two-decade career built on turking
For some workers, Mechanical Turk wasn’t a side gig — it was a livelihood. Pawloski began turking in 2008 while on maternity leave, using it as supplemental income, before shifting to the work full-time in 2012 after losing her job and needing flexibility to care for her son, who has special needs. She began organizing with Turkopticon in 2019; the group originally focused specifically on Mechanical Turk workers before broadening its scope to data workers more generally.Pawloski said platforms like Mechanical Turk have long provided meaningful income and flexible, remote work comparable to other gig economy jobs like ride-hailing or Amazon Flex delivery — with the added advantage of being completable from a smartphone. She said a small but dedicated group of workers still rely on the platform as a full-time job, and are now facing real uncertainty about what comes next.
