Launched in 2005, the platform enabled companies to hire people to complete small, routine tasks that computers could not easily handle at the time.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Jeff Bezos once summarized the concept with a phrase that stuck: “artificial artificial intelligence,” in remarks about the platform.<\/p>\n Latest Videos FromTechRadar<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cWe regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,\u201d a notice on the Mechanical Turk website said.<\/p>\n \u201cFollowing an assessment, we\u2019ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.\u201d<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n The platform’s original name referenced a historical automaton that appeared to play chess but was secretly guided by a hidden human operator.<\/p>\n Amazon initially built Mechanical Turk to help label the enormous volume of product data listed across its own retail website.<\/p>\n At its peak, the service reportedly connected more than 500,000 workers, known informally as turkers, to available paid tasks online.<\/p>\n Workers typically earned only a few cents per task, completing jobs like tagging photos, converting speech into text, or filling out surveys.<\/p>\n Amazon later marketed that same workforce as a convenient data annotation source to support its own SageMaker machine learning service.<\/p>\n What to read next<\/p>\n Rapid AI growth left the human workforce behind<\/p>\n Krista Pawloski, an organizer with the worker advocacy group Turkopticon, said the platform had clearly been declining for several years now.<\/p>\n She said Amazon appeared to spend less on maintaining the platform just as several newer competitors entered the market rapidly.<\/p>\n Companies including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have since emerged to recruit workers specifically for training a wide range of newer AI models.<\/p>\n Researchers based in Switzerland published a 2023 study reporting that 46% of surveyed workers had relied on AI systems while finishing assigned jobs.<\/p>\n Amazon disclosed one month earlier that it would no longer accept new customers, a move workers quietly read as an early warning sign.<\/p>\n Certain firms in insurance and travel sectors continue relying on this workforce and are now hurriedly searching for replacement services.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s some people that still pretty much still do it full time,\u201d said Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon. \u201cThey\u2019re concerned now.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Mechanical Turk is going down, the company claims to remain committed to serving both its Amazon and AWS customer base well.<\/p>\n \u201c[Amazon is] focused on delivering the best possible experience for all our Amazon and AWS customers,\u201d said Amazon\u2019s spokesperson Montana MacLachlan.<\/p>\n The platform’s decline says as much about shifting AI economics as it does about Amazon’s own waning commitment to it.<\/p>\n A service once built to prove humans could out-think machines is closing just as AI tools<\/a> increasingly outcompete many of those same humans.<\/p>\n Via CNBC<\/a><\/p>\n \n Follow TechRadar on Google News<\/a> and add us as a preferred source<\/a> to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amazon will permanently close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026Mechanical Turk once connected more than 500,000 workers with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":754420,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-754419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/754420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/diM9tpwF2Lz85R8q85CT78.jpg\")
\n<\/p>\n