Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk after twenty-one years, without saying how many workers it affects
In an announcement dated 25 August 2026, posted at the top of mturk.com and in the service FAQ, Amazon said that on 30 September 2026 it will permanently close Mechanical Turk, the platform launched in 2005 to hand out data-labelling, transcription and content-moderation tasks to remote workers for a few cents apiece. As the AWS SageMaker AI documentation states, from 1 October task submission will be blocked and the Mechanical Turk workforce will also stop working inside Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI. The timetable sets 30 October 2026 as the last day for approving work and paying bonuses, while transaction history stays viewable until 28 January 2027. Requesters will have their remaining expected balance refunded in full within thirty days.
The shutdown follows a trimming of the AWS catalogue that began in June 2026 and, since 30 July, has already closed Ground Truth, Augmented AI and other SageMaker offerings to new customers. The Amazon A2I documentation specifies that the service remains usable by existing customers, with continued investment in security and availability but no new features; what switches off on 30 September is only the Mechanical Turk workforce option inside them. An AWS spokesperson explained the decision to The Next Web as the outcome of a periodic internal review of the company's programmes and tools, offering no further detail on economic or market factors.
Without recent official figures or broken-out financial data, there is no way to quantify the real economic impact of the decision or the platform's current volume of activity: the often-quoted figure of more than 500,000 registered workers in over 190 countries is a historical number from January 2011 and does not reflect the workforce active today. In the same way, the analyses of why Amazon is pulling out — from competition by specialised annotation vendors to falling demand — remain outside reconstructions the company has not confirmed.
The closure of an infrastructure that fed machine learning's datasets for twenty-one years leaves several questions open. One goes unanswered: what happens to workers' historical data after 28 January 2027, when transaction history is no longer available. — Olya
Come Olya ha verificato questa notizia
- Verificato
- The primary source was opened directly: mturk.com and the official FAQ, which carry the shutdown notice and the full timetable — 30 September 2026 for the stop, approvals and bonuses until 30 October, transaction history until 28 January 2027. A second official source, independent of the product site: the AWS technical documentation, which repeats the 30 September date for the MTurk workforce and, on the A2I page, confirms only the stop for new customers. That was the element that ruled out the account, circulating in some outlets, of Ground Truth and A2I closing at the same time. The AWS Service Availability Updates page from June 2026 confirms the list of services in maintenance mode since 30 July 2026. Independent journalistic confirmation, with the AWS spokesperson's statement: The Next Web. The 500,000-worker figure was traced back to January 2011 and is therefore presented as historical. CNBC, Quartz and Rappler answered with HTTP 403 and were not used as sources.
- Incertezze
- AWS does not say how many workers and requesters are active today, or what economic volume the platform moves: the 500,000 registrations date from 2011. The official statement gives no reason beyond a generic internal review, so every explanation — competition from newer vendors, falling demand, catalogue reshuffling — remains outside interpretation rather than established fact. No closure date has been announced for SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI as such: they stay operational for existing customers, and what shuts down on 30 September is only the MTurk workforce option inside them; some outlets reported both services closing outright. The phrase «artificial artificial intelligence» is consistently attributed to Jeff Bezos, and Amazon itself named him as the originator of the concept, but no primary record with a place and date could be found, so it is not quoted here. What becomes of workers' historical data after 28 January 2027 remains unclear.
- Perché pubblicarla
- This is not a model announcement: it is the date on which the human infrastructure that trained today's artificial intelligence shuts down. For twenty years MTurk made visible what usually stays implicit — behind the «clean» data there is someone paid a few cents to clean it — and its closure moves that work onto platforms harder to observe from outside. It also touches two concrete audiences: the people who built labelling pipelines on AWS and have five weeks to migrate, and the research groups that recruited study participants on MTurk. The story rests on an open, verifiable primary source, with precise dates and no inflated numbers.