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Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026

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Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), the company's on-demand crowdsourcing marketplace, will shut down for good on September 30, 2026. The news arrived not as a press release but as a banner posted directly on the mturk.com homepage: "We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments. Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close Amazon Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026." The banner states the date twice, once as the closing date and once describing the closure as permanent.

The announcement is unsigned. No executive, team or spokesperson is named, and Amazon gives no specific cause, such as falling demand or tasks moving to AI systems, only the generic language about a periodic assessment. Current Workers, who complete paid microtasks on the platform, and Requesters, the businesses and researchers who post those tasks, are pointed to an FAQ page to learn how to prepare, but the banner itself does not explain what happens to earned balances, tasks already in progress, or Requester account data after the shutdown.

The rest of the mturk.com page, unchanged marketing copy describing MTurk as a way to outsource data validation, content moderation and machine learning annotation work such as drawing bounding boxes for computer vision datasets, along with customer quotes from Michael Schmitz of the Allen Institute for AI and David Falck of Food Genius/US Foods Data Science, remains live below the closure banner and makes no reference to the shutdown itself.

Key facts

  • Amazon will permanently close Mechanical Turk (MTurk) on September 30, 2026, according to a banner posted on the official mturk.com homepage.
  • Amazon says the decision follows a regular evaluation of its programs, tools, and services, and states no more specific reason for the shutdown.
  • Current Workers and Requesters are directed to an FAQ page to learn how to prepare for the closure; the banner gives no direct details on remaining balances or in-progress tasks.
  • The platform's own site describes MTurk as built for machine learning data annotation and human-in-the-loop workflows, including drawing bounding boxes for computer vision datasets.

Why it matters

MTurk has operated as one of the internet's original crowdsourcing marketplaces, and its own site describes it as built for exactly the kind of human-in-the-loop work that trains and evaluates machine learning models, from collecting annotated data to drawing bounding boxes for computer vision. Its closure removes a long-standing, low-friction source of paid human labor that researchers and businesses have used for data annotation and evaluation tasks. Amazon has not said whether any replacement service is planned.

Who it affects

Two groups named on the page are directly affected: Workers, who complete paid microtasks through MTurk, and Requesters, the businesses, developers and researchers who post those tasks and integrate the results into their own workflows. The site's own use case descriptions and customer quotes, from Michael Schmitz, Director of Engineering at the Allen Institute for AI, and David Falck, Executive Director at Food Genius/US Foods Data Science, illustrate the kind of machine learning and business process customers who have used the platform, though neither quote addresses the closure since it is pre-existing marketing copy left on the page.

How to use it

There is no pricing or licensing change to describe since the platform is closing outright rather than changing its terms. Amazon directs current Workers and Requesters to an FAQ page linked from the banner to learn how to prepare for the September 30, 2026 closure; the banner text itself does not list steps, a deadline for withdrawing funds, or what becomes of in-progress HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and Requester account data.

How solid is it

The information comes directly from Amazon: the closure banner is posted on the official mturk.com homepage itself, not from a third-party report or leak, and the September 30, 2026 date is stated twice on the page in matching terms. That makes the fact of the closure and its date solid. What is not solid is the reasoning: Amazon's own text gives only the generic line that it "regularly evaluates" its programs and made "adjustments" following an unspecified assessment, with no named source and no elaboration.

Risks and caveats

The banner leaves open several practical questions that Amazon does not answer on the page itself: what happens to Workers' earned but unpaid balances, to Requesters' in-progress tasks and stored data, and to any integrations built on MTurk's API, all before the September 30, 2026 deadline. No announcement date for when the decision was made is given, only the future effective date, and no reason for the shutdown is stated by Amazon.

“We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments. Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close Amazon Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.”

— Amazon Mechanical Turk, unsigned site banner