Amazon announced that it will close Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing service launched in 2005 that connected requesters with micro‑task workers. The decision comes as generative AI tools increasingly handle tasks that previously required human judgment, prompting the company to reallocate resources toward its AI services.
Jeff Bezos, who once described Mechanical Turk as “artificial artificial intelligence,” said the platform had served a valuable role but now faces “fundamental redundancy” in the age of large language models. Amazon will cease accepting new tasks immediately and will keep existing projects running for a limited transition period.
The shutdown will affect thousands of global gig workers who rely on the platform for supplemental income. Amazon has pledged to provide a migration toolkit, allowing requesters to move active jobs to its newer AI‑driven services such as Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and to offer workers guidance on alternative gig platforms.
