Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk after 21 years

Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, ending the crowdwork marketplace after 21 years, the company said in a statement to CNBC. MTurk paid people small amounts to do tasks software couldn't handle, like labeling images or transcribing audio. Generative AI got cheap at that same work fast, and Scale, Mercor and Prolific absorbed the buyers Amazon didn't keep.

The platform stopped accepting new customers in July, so September's date is the final step in a wind-down that's been running for weeks.

One number needs a caveat. A widely shared claim says 46% of MTurk tasks were being done by workers running the output through AI tools. That figure comes from a 2023 academic survey of workers, three years before this shutdown. It measured worker behavior at that time, not the state of the marketplace when Amazon closed it in 2026.

The workers weren't replaced so much as bypassed. If the crowd was already running tasks through ChatGPT, buyers had no reason to keep paying Amazon's fee when they could reach the model directly.