Amazon Announces Final Closure of Mechanical Turk Crowdsourcing Platform

Amazon has set a definitive shutdown date for Mechanical Turk (MTurk), the pioneering crowdsourced human-labeling marketplace that has been central to AI training data pipelines for nearly two decades. The closure marks a symbolic inflection point: the human annotation infrastructure that underpinned much of supervised ML is being retired as AI-generated synthetic data and automated labeling tools take over. For developers and ML engineers who still rely on MTurk for annotation, evaluation, or human-in-the-loop tasks, this is an urgent operational signal to migrate to alternatives such as Scale AI, Labelbox, or in-house pipelines. The shutdown also reflects Amazon's broader bet that its own AI services (via AWS and Bedrock) are where its data-related investment should flow. Teams using MTurk in any production or research capacity should begin transition planning immediately.