Amazon will shut down AWS Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, CNBC reports, citing a notice posted to the platform’s website. The company said in the notice that it regularly reviews its programs and decided after an assessment to close the service. Mechanical Turk, often shortened to MTurk, launched in 2005 as a marketplace for small online jobs that computers struggled to perform reliably. CNBC reports that those jobs, known on the platform as Human Intelligence Tasks, have included data labeling, audio and video transcription, and survey responses, often paying only a few cents per task. The service was closely tied to an earlier era of machine intelligence. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos described it as “artificial artificial intelligence,” according to CNBC, because the platform made human judgment available through software workflows. Its name came from the 18th-century Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing automaton that appeared mechanical but was actually operated by a human chess master. CNBC reports that Amazon originally conceived the idea to help label large volumes of data for its webstore, citing earlier New York Times reporting. At one point, the platform served more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon figures cited by CNBC. Those workers were commonly known as turkers. The shutdown lands as the market for human data work has changed. CNBC notes that AI models have improved substantially since MTurk launched, while data startups including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific have built businesses around recruiting workers to help train models. Amazon also marketed MTurk as a data annotation source for its SageMaker service, positioning the workforce as available for human review and labeling jobs. Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, told CNBC that MTurk had been in decline and that Amazon appeared to invest fewer resources in the platform as competing data-labeling services grew. CNBC also reports that some turkers moved to other platforms. Amazon representatives did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. The platform’s role in AI-era data pipelines had also drawn quality questions. CNBC cites a 2023 study by academic researchers in Switzerland that found up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete tasks. That finding matters because MTurk’s premise rested on routing work to humans when machine systems were not dependable enough to do it. Amazon had already narrowed the service before the shutdown notice. CNBC reports that the company stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers last month, which many workers interpreted as an indication that the service could be discontinued. Pawloski told CNBC that some insurance and travel companies still rely on MTurk for data workers and are now looking for alternative platforms. Who benefits: Alternative data-work and annotation platforms may pick up workers or customers that still use MTurk. CNBC names Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific as companies already active in recruiting workers for AI training work. Who's exposed: MTurk workers who still depend on the platform and companies that use it for human review or labeling tasks face a transition deadline. CNBC specifically reports that some insurance and travel companies still depend on MTurk and are seeking alternatives.