Amazon's 21-year-old crowdsourcing platform shuts down for good this week
Mechanical Turk's exit marks AI taking over the micro-tasks it lived on, narrowing gig income and data-labeling channels.
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Amazon will permanently shut down its crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk on Wednesday, ending a 21-year run.
Launched in 2005, the platform broke chores software could not handle — transcription, image labeling, surveys — into "Human Intelligence Tasks" that often paid just cents apiece, and it became a fixture for researchers, remote freelancers and data labelers. According to GeekWire, Amazon stopped onboarding new clients earlier this summer before quietly confirming the full closure.
The direct cause is that modern AI tools automated exactly those simple tasks, and workers themselves increasingly turned to AI to complete assignments. Long-time users are saying goodbye in forums: some paid off debt with it, one earned nearly $20,000 over four years. The platform's exit does not end data work — only its earliest prototype.