Amazon will permanently shut Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, after a review and a halt to new customer sign-ups last month.

Launched in 2005, the crowdsourcing platform let companies outsource digital tasks such as data annotation, transcription, and surveys, often for a few cents per job. At one point, it had more than 500,000 workers.

Mechanical Turk’s activity and influence had declined in recent years as AI systems took over some simple tasks and rivals such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Prolific recruited workers for model training.

A 2023 study estimated that 33% to 46% of workers in one Mechanical Turk summarization task used large language models, though the researchers said it was unclear whether that finding applied to other types of tasks.

Data worker rights group Turkopticon said the shutdown will affect workers and some companies that still rely on the service.

Separate academic work has also placed Mechanical Turk-related issues within the broader debate over large language model data contamination.

🔗 Source: CNBC

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