Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk, its crowdsourcing marketplace, on September 30, 2026.
Amazon announced the permanent closure of Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026. The platform allowed businesses to outsource microtasks like data validation, content moderation, and survey participation to a global on-demand workforce. Amazon cited regular program evaluations as the reason for the closure. Workers and requesters are directed to an FAQ page to prepare. The service was also used for building and evaluating machine learning workflows, business process outsourcing, and collecting human insights.
The closure follows a July 2026 decision to stop accepting new customers.
What commenters are saying
Commenters noted the closure comes just as AI and robotics create new potential for human-in-the-loop platforms. Many observed that LLMs and bots had been flooding MTurk with low-quality, automated responses, undermining the trust and verification needed for reliable human work. A former top requester described using MTurk for biomedical annotation and later arbitraging market research, and revealed that paying in $0.07 intervals let them exploit MTurk's commission rounding. Several commenters pointed to existing alternatives like Rentahuman and other AI training-data companies, but argued that good, verified data is not cheap and that in-house oversight is often preferable.