Amazon Is Shutting Down Mechanical Turk (MTurk): What Now

Amazon announced on August 26, 2026 that Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is shutting down permanently on September 30, 2026, ending a 21-year run. If you work on MTurk: your money is safe, but go set a payment method and payment frequency in the Worker Portal today — payouts follow your existing schedule, and that schedule needs to exist. If you run tasks on it: stop launching new work, and expect a full refund of your prepaid balance within about 30 days. The deadlines, the refund mechanics, and the alternatives are all below. But here is the part that makes this more than routine corporate housekeeping: the modern AI boom was hand-built on this site. The image dataset that taught computers to see was labeled by roughly 49,000 MTurk workers across 167 countries, working for cents per click — and the technology their clicks made possible is a big part of why their marketplace no longer needs to exist. Jeff Bezos once called MTurk "artificial artificial intelligence." The artificial part finally caught up.

Jake tried Mechanical Turk exactly once, in his second year of college, after a forum post promised "easy money between classes." He spent an evening categorizing photographs of shoes — sneaker or sandal, sneaker or sandal — and finished with $3.80 and a headache. He never went back, and for years that was his whole verdict on the platform: a curiosity that did not pay. It took him embarrassingly long to understand what he had actually been doing that evening. Somewhere, a machine-learning model was learning the difference between sneakers and sandals, and it was learning it from him. His $3.80 was a teaching salary. Multiply that evening by half a million registered workers and twenty-one years, and you get something history books will struggle to credit properly: the datasets behind the AI systems everyone now uses were assembled, click by click, by anonymous people paid pennies — students in one country, retirees in another, and for a real number of people, a full-time income that ends on September 30.

Ethan: "In 1770, an inventor named Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled a chess-playing ‘machine’ — a wooden figure in a turban that defeated human challengers across Europe for decades. Napoleon reportedly lost to it. The secret? A human chess master folded inside the cabinet, moving the pieces. It was called the Mechanical Turk, and it was the most famous fake robot in history: a machine that was secretly a person. Amazon naming its service after that hoax was a genuinely great joke — software that looked automated but had humans hidden inside, ‘artificial artificial intelligence.’ The bitter punchline arrived 21 years later: the machine finally learned to play for real, and the people inside the cabinet were told they could go home."

What Mechanical Turk actually was, in plain English

Launched in 2005, MTurk was a marketplace for micro-work. Businesses and researchers ("Requesters") posted tiny digital tasks called HITs — Human Intelligence Tasks — and workers anywhere in the world picked them up for a listed price, usually cents to a few dollars each. Label this image. Transcribe this receipt. Answer this psychology survey. Judge whether this comment is toxic. Things that were trivial for a human and, for most of those 21 years, impossible for software.

That gap — trivial for humans, impossible for machines — was the entire business model, and Bezos’s "artificial artificial intelligence" line captured it perfectly: programmers could call the MTurk API the way they would call any software service, except the "processor" answering was a crowd of human beings. At its peak the crowd numbered more than 500,000 registered workers. Academia quietly ran on it too — a remarkable share of published social-science research over the past fifteen years surveyed its participants through MTurk, because nowhere else could you reach a thousand respondents overnight for a few hundred dollars.

Every deadline that matters now, in one table

Amazon’s closure FAQ spreads these across several answers; here they are in one place. The dates come from the official notice and closure FAQ as of August 26 — if you depend on any of them, confirm against mturk.com/help before acting, since Amazon can revise its own timeline:

If you are a worker: five things to do this week

First, breathe: your earned money is not being confiscated. Payouts continue on whatever schedule you already have. The genuine risk is quieter — accounts with no payment method or no payment frequency configured have no schedule for the money to follow. So:

1. Sign into the Worker Portal — the worker login still lives at worker.mturk.com — and confirm both a payment method and a payment frequency are set. This is the single action Amazon’s own FAQ leads with, and it takes two minutes.
2. Submit any in-progress HITs well before September 30 — nothing can be submitted after the doors close.
3. Do not panic about slow Requesters: work submitted before the close that sits unreviewed for 30 days is approved automatically, and payment follows.
4. Save your records now — screenshots or exports of your transaction history, qualifications, and lifetime earnings. On January 28, 2027 the history vanishes, and "I’ll do it later" has a hard expiry date. Your tax documents, for what it is worth, still arrive through the normal process.
5. If a payout does not land within your usual disbursement window after the close, contact MTurk customer service — do not assume it is simply gone.

And one warning that matters more this month than ever: shutdowns attract scavengers. Expect "MTurk replacement" sites and messages promising to migrate your account or your balance. Any platform that asks you to pay to join, or asks for your MTurk credentials, is a scam — no exceptions. The legitimate alternatives further down this page never charge workers an entry fee.

If you are a Requester or researcher: your checklist

1. Stop launching long-running batches — anything unfinished on September 30 simply expires (you are not charged for unsubmitted work).
2. Review and approve submitted work promptly rather than leaning on the 30-day auto-approve; the people who did your tasks are watching their balances this month.
3. If you owe bonuses, pay them before October 30 — after that the mechanism is gone.
4. Verify your payment information in the Requester Portal (requester.mturk.com) so your prepaid-balance refund (full, within about 30 days) processes cleanly.
5. Download everything: results files, worker qualification lists you built over years, and your transaction history — all of it becomes unreachable on January 28, 2027.

Academic readers, one extra note with sympathy: if your IRB protocol or grant names MTurk as the recruitment platform, that paperwork now needs amending too, and review boards move slower than shutdown clocks. Start that conversation this week, not in September.

How a pennies-per-click site built the AI boom

Here is the history that makes this shutdown genuinely poignant. In the late 2000s, a Stanford team led by Fei-Fei Li set out to build a dataset absurd for its time: millions of photographs, every one labeled by hand. The project — ImageNet — was only possible because MTurk existed; by the team’s own count, roughly 49,000 workers in 167 countries sorted and labeled the images. In 2012, a neural network trained on that dataset shattered every computer-vision record, and the modern deep-learning era started, more or less, on that day. The straight line from "sneaker or sandal, $0.02" to the large language models everyone argues about today runs directly through the MTurk workforce.

It never stopped, either. Long after ImageNet, MTurk workers transcribed the audio, rated the search results, flagged the toxic comments, and judged the chatbot answers that fed a decade of machine-learning systems. AWS even wired the crowd directly into its own tools — SageMaker’s labeling service could route your data straight to MTurk workers. If you have ever wondered where AI "learned" things, the unglamorous first answer is: from people, most of them anonymous, many of them paid less per hour than any job you have ever had.

Why Amazon is really closing it

Amazon’s official statement is corporate boilerplate — "we regularly evaluate our programs… following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk." Fair enough; companies rarely eulogize. The honest reading has three parts, and none of them is a secret:

First, AI ate the tasks. The core MTurk menu — label this image, transcribe this audio, categorize this text — is exactly what modern models now do in milliseconds for fractions of a cent. The gap between "trivial for humans, impossible for machines" closed, and it was the business model standing in that gap. Second, the specialized players took what was left. The AI-training work that still needs humans has moved upmarket — companies like Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific recruit vetted experts (doctors reviewing medical answers, programmers grading code) rather than anonymous crowds, and pay accordingly. Third, the crowd itself started using AI. In a finding almost too on-the-nose to believe, a 2023 Swiss study estimated that in one text-writing experiment, roughly a third to nearly half of MTurk submissions showed signs of being completed with AI assistance. The humans hired to be artificial artificial intelligence had begun quietly subcontracting to the real thing. At that point, the cabinet was empty either way.

The AWS ripple: SageMaker Ground Truth and Augmented AI

If you use AWS’s machine-learning tools, this shutdown reaches you too, in one specific place: the Amazon Mechanical Turk workforce option inside SageMaker Ground Truth (data labeling) and Amazon Augmented AI (human review of model predictions) becomes unavailable on the same September 30 date. Labeling jobs that pointed at the public MTurk crowd need a new workforce — your own private team or an AWS-vetted vendor workforce. If your pipeline quietly depends on that public-crowd checkbox, this is your migration deadline as much as anyone’s. (New to this corner of AWS? Our free AWS learning series walks the whole SageMaker neighborhood in plain English.)

Where to go instead: honest alternatives by use case

A gentle expectation-setter for displaced workers, because false hope helps nobody: none of these platforms absorbs half a million people. The micro-task economy MTurk invented is genuinely shrinking, not relocating — the work that remains pays better but demands more (subject expertise, strong English, verified identity). If you are deciding where to invest effort, the durable direction is toward the skills the machines still need humans to check: judgment, domain knowledge, and knowing what AI systems actually do well enough to catch them being wrong.

The cabinet is empty now: what this moment means

The original Mechanical Turk toured for 84 years before it burned in a Philadelphia museum fire; Edgar Allan Poe himself wrote an essay arguing (correctly) that a hidden human had to be involved — because obviously no machine could really do that. Amazon’s version lasted 21 years, and its ending argues the reverse: the machine really can do it now, for the small, repetitive slices of human judgment that MTurk sold. That is worth sitting with, without either panic or cheerleading. The people in the cabinet were real, they built the foundations of the AI products now sold by the very cloud that employed them, and most of their names appear in no paper and no changelog. If AI feels like magic to you, September 30 is a good day to remember that a lot of the magic was people all along.

FAQ — the MTurk shutdown, answered straight

When is Amazon Mechanical Turk shutting down?

September 30, 2026 — announced August 26, 2026. The platform had already stopped accepting new Requester customers at the end of July.

Will MTurk workers get their remaining money?

Yes. Earnings pay out on your existing payment schedule. The critical step is having a payment method and payment frequency configured in the Worker Portal — do that now.

What happens to HITs a Requester never approves?

Work submitted before the close auto-approves after 30 days of Requester inaction, and payment follows. Slow Requesters cannot strand your earnings.

What is the last day to submit work on MTurk?

September 30, 2026. Nothing can be submitted after the platform closes.

Do Requesters get their prepaid balance back?

Yes — Amazon says to expect a full refund within about 30 days of the close. Verify your payment information in the Requester Portal so it processes cleanly.

Until when can Requesters pay worker bonuses?

October 30, 2026. After that the bonus mechanism is gone, so settle what you owe early.

How long can I access my MTurk transaction history?

Until January 28, 2027. Export or screenshot everything you might ever need — earnings records, results, qualifications — before that date.

Why is Amazon closing Mechanical Turk?

Officially, a routine assessment of its services. Practically: modern AI now performs most micro-tasks instantly, specialized firms took the expert-labeling market, and the platform’s era had ended.

What did Jeff Bezos mean by "artificial artificial intelligence"?

MTurk looked like a software service to the programmer calling it, but humans produced the answers — artificial AI. The name honors an 18th-century chess "machine" with a human hidden inside.

Was the original Mechanical Turk a real machine?

No — the 1770 automaton concealed a human chess player. It toured for decades and reportedly beat Napoleon before burning in a museum fire in 1854.

Did MTurk really help create modern AI?

Directly. ImageNet — the dataset whose 2012 breakthrough launched the deep-learning era — was labeled by roughly 49,000 MTurk workers across 167 countries, and crowd-labeled data fed AI systems for years after.

What should researchers use instead of MTurk for surveys?

Prolific and CloudResearch are the standard migrations — built for research, with participant screening. Budget more per response than MTurk charged, and amend IRB protocols that name MTurk.

What replaces MTurk inside SageMaker Ground Truth?

Ground Truth itself continues — only its public MTurk workforce option ends September 30. Point labeling jobs at a private workforce or an AWS vendor workforce instead.

Where can MTurk workers earn instead?

Prolific, DataAnnotation, and transcription platforms are the honest starting points — with real waitlists and higher skill bars. Never pay to join any work platform; that is always a scam.

Will AI companies stop using human workers entirely?

No — the work moved upmarket. Model training still employs humans for expert review, evaluation, and edge cases; it just no longer buys anonymous micro-clicks at scale.

Can I still log in to MTurk?

Yes, until September 30, 2026 — workers at worker.mturk.com, Requesters at requester.mturk.com. After the close, use those credentials promptly for any record-saving; transaction history stays viewable only until January 28, 2027.

Are there still Amazon Mechanical Turk jobs available?

Only until September 30, 2026, and volume is already thinning — new Requesters were cut off in July. If you searched "mturk jobs" hoping to start: do not invest in a platform with five weeks to live; start with the alternatives above instead.

Is my MTurk tax documentation still coming?

Yes — Amazon says tax-related documents will still be distributed through the established process for the applicable period.

Revision note. This page was written on August 26, 2026 — the day Amazon announced the shutdown — from the official closure notice and FAQ as they stood that morning. Deadlines of this kind occasionally shift, so if you are making a decision that depends on one, take thirty seconds to confirm it at mturk.com/help first; if you spot a date that has moved, tell us through the contact page and this page gets corrected the same day. And to the workers reading this while doing the math on September: the last section of this page was written for you, and it was meant. Twenty-one years of clicks taught the machines nearly everything they know. That was real work, and it counted.Don't be disappointed! there are many ways to earn money online.Never lose hope!