Amazon, Mechanical Turk platformunu 30 Eylül 2026 'da kapatıyor

Amazon shutting down Mechanical Turk platform on Sept. 30, 2026

Wed, August 26, 2026 at 2:09 PM GMT+3 2 min read

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Amazon announced Tuesday it will shut down its Mechanical Turk crowdsourced labor platform on September 30, 2026. The company said it made the decision following an internal assessment of its programs and services.

"Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026," a notice posted to the platform's website said.

Amazon launched Mechanical Turk in 2005, building a marketplace where businesses could post small digital jobs — formally known as Human Intelligence Tasks — ranging from data labeling and audio or video transcription to survey completion. Workers are typically paid a few cents per task, according to CNBC. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos coined the phrase "artificial artificial intelligence" to describe the service, noting that it handed off to humans the kinds of tasks that computers still couldn't handle reliably.

At its peak, the platform served more than 500,000 workers. In recent years, though, the service had been "in decline," according to CNBC, citing Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, an advocacy group for data workers. Pawloski said that Amazon appeared to invest fewer resources into improving the platform as competing data labeling services arrived, drawing workers away.

The shutdown comes as AI models have advanced and a new crop of data labeling startups — including Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific — have entered the market to recruit workers for AI training.

Last month, Amazon stopped accepting new Mechanical Turk customers, a move many workers interpreted as a sign the service would soon close. Pawloski said insurance and travel companies that have continued to use the platform are now working to find replacement services before the shutdown.

Pawloski, who started using the platform in 2008 and eventually made it her primary job by 2012, described it as a source of remote, flexible earnings for a broad range of workers. "There's some people that still pretty much still do it full time," Pawloski said. "They're concerned now."

Questions about the quality of work on the platform surfaced in recent years. Research published in 2023 by Swiss academic researchers determined that as many as 46% of Mechanical Turk workers were using AI models to finish their assigned tasks.