Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk: the micro-work platform to stop on September 30, 2026

Twenty-one years after its debut, Amazon Web Services has informed its customers that Amazon Mechanical Turk will cease operations on September 30, 2026, at the conclusion of an internal assessment. The service had already stopped accepting new customers on July 30, 2026: the September date closes a wind-down process begun months earlier. The news currently comes from a single source (AWS’s communication to service users, reported by the index AI Weekly); no independent confirmation available.

Mechanical Turk was launched in 2005 as a micro-work platform: a meeting point for those who needed short tasks performed and those willing to carry them out. Jeff Bezos had called it “artificial artificial intelligence,” a formula describing the mechanism: a service that appeared to the requester as an automated function but internally contained people. The same source attributes that expression to Bezos; the available material reports neither the compensation practiced nor specific examples of the assigned tasks.

The closure is not an isolated incident but the culmination of two converging pressures. The first is competitive: demand for data to train models has grown enormously, but has shifted toward operators built specifically for that task — the source cites Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific — described as native data providers for artificial intelligence. A general-purpose platform, built when data labeling was a marginal trade, found itself competing on ground it had helped create.

The second pressure concerns the substance of the product. A 2023 study cited by the same source had found that many workers on the platform performed assigned tasks by resorting to language models, undermining the premise of human judgment. The detail is not anecdotal: those who bought human labor on Mechanical Turk bought it precisely because it was not automated. It should be noted that, from the available material, neither the sample size nor the survey method of that study is known: the figure indicates a reported trend, not an established measurement.

Comparison with another news item from the same week clarifies the shift of resources. AM Intelligence, a company of the Greenko group based in Hyderabad, signed a binding order for approximately 9,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, with delivery expected in the first quarter of 2027, which would place the company among the first Asian operators to have them. The announced investment is approximately $8 billion to bring 200 MW online in the short term, with the stated goal of reaching 1 GW of computing capacity offered as a service across India, the United States, Finland and Malaysia. The same caveat applies to this news as well: it currently comes from a single source (the newspaper Taipei Times, picked up in the AI Weekly index); no independent confirmation available.

The two events are not causally linked, but they illuminate the same reshuffling. In the 2005 model, intelligence applied to a piece of data passed through a multitude of people performing short tasks. In the model toward which the industry is moving, spending is energy, silicon and multi-year supply commitments, concentrated among a few companies capable of locking in billions years in advance.

Two dates remain fixed: September 30, 2026, when Mechanical Turk stops operating, and the first quarter of 2027, when the systems ordered from Hyderabad are expected to be delivered.

Sources: AI Weekly (AWS communication to service customers; news from the newspaper Taipei Times picked up in the index).