Amazon Mechanical Turk will shut down permanently on September 30

Amazon has announced that Mechanical Turk, its long-running crowdsourcing marketplace, will close permanently on September 30, 2026. The notice sits at the top of the platform's own homepage.

Why the platform is closing

In Amazon's wording, the company "regularly evaluates programs, tools, and services and makes adjustments based on those assessments." The decision to shut Mechanical Turk down followed exactly such a review. The notice is explicit that the closure is permanent, and it directs current Workers and Requesters to a help page that explains how to prepare for the shutdown.

What Mechanical Turk did

MTurk was a marketplace for microtasks — small, self-contained pieces of work handed to an on-demand, geographically distributed workforce that businesses could scale up and down. Amazon marketed it for tasks humans still perform better than software: data validation and deduplication, research, survey participation, content moderation, and the categorisation of products or images.

The platform also became a fixture in machine-learning development. Teams used it to collect and annotate the large datasets needed to train models, to build evaluation sets, and to run human-in-the-loop workflows in which human feedback validates or retrains a system. One example documented by Amazon is drawing bounding boxes for computer-vision datasets — work too ambiguous for a purely mechanical solution and too large for a dedicated team of experts.

What changes for users

With the shutdown weeks away, the consequences land on both sides of the marketplace. Businesses that outsourced annotation, moderation and research work now need alternative vendors or in-house processes, while workers paid per task lose a source of income. The notice names no successor service and no data-export path; users are pointed to the closure FAQ instead.