{
  "id": 3528756,
  "title": "Amazon Sunsets Crowd-Sourced Work Platform MTurk",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/26/amazon-sunsets-crowd-sourced-work-platform-mturk",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-08-26T14:58:56.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "PYMNTS",
    "slug": "pymnts",
    "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/amazon/2026/amazon-sunsets-crowd-sourced-work-platform-mturk/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Amazon has announced it will cease operations for its crowdsourced work platform, Mechanical Turk, on September 30, 2026. The tech giant explained that they regularly assess their programs and services, and following their evaluation, decided to close Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk connects workers with simple digital jobs, often paying a few cents per task, such as labeling data, answering surveys, or transcribing audio or video.\n\nAmazon founded Mechanical Turk, also known as \"artificial artificial intelligence,\" to provide jobs that are difficult for computers but easily completed by humans. The service was named after a 1700s chess-playing \"robot\" that was actually controlled by a human. At its peak, Mechanical Turk employed over 500,000 workers, or \"turkers.\"\n\nHowever, the platform has been in decline, with data worker Krista Pawloski noting that AI models have advanced rapidly since 2005, leading to the emergence of several startups offering data labeling services. Many turkers have since moved to competing platforms as Amazon has devoted fewer resources to improving Mechanical Turk.\n\nAccording to recent research by PYMNTS Intelligence, Amazon's share of U.S. clothing spending has doubled since 2019, reaching 17% in 2025, while Walmart's share has decreased from 7.3% to 6.2% during the same period. Amazon's clothing spending accounted for 8.5% of U.S. spending in 2019, compared to the current 17%.",
  "summary": "After 21 years, Amazon is shutting down its crowdsourced work platform Mechanical Turk. “We regularly evaluate our programs, tools and services and make adjustments based on those assessments,” the tech giant wrote Tuesday (Aug. 25) in a notice posted to the Mechanical Turk (MTurk) website. “Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September […] The…",
  "key_points": [
    "Amazon will shut down Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026.",
    "Mechanical Turk connects workers with simple digital jobs.",
    "Amazon closed platform after evaluating programs and services."
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}