The marketplace that taught machines to see is closing. Amazon shuts Mechanical Turk on 30 September, 21 years on.
Amazon confirmed this week that Mechanical Turk will shut down on 30 September 2026, after stopping new sign-ups at the end of July. The company says the decision followed an internal review of its programmes and services. MTurk launched in 2005 as a place to post Human Intelligence Tasks — small jobs a computer could not then do, priced at a few cents each: labelling an image, transcribing a clip, sitting a survey. At its peak more than 500,000 workers were registered. Almost every early computer-vision and language dataset ran through work like this, and a generation of social science ran its experiments there because the sample was cheap and instant. The market did not disappear; it moved and it moved upmarket. Data work for frontier models is now the business of Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific, who recruit narrower, better-paid, often credentialled contributors — doctors, lawyers, competitive programmers — because what models still cannot do has changed.
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