Amazon Sunsets Crowd-Sourced Work Platform MTurk

Amazon has announced that it will officially shut down its crowdsourced micro-task marketplace, Mechanical Turk (MTurk), effective September 30, 2026, after 21 years of operation. Launched in 2005 and historically characterized by founder Jeff Bezos as 'artificial artificial intelligence,' the platform connected businesses with human workers for discrete digital tasks such as survey completion, audio transcription, and data labeling. The service once maintained an active global workforce of more than 500,000 workers. The decision comes as rapid technological advancements in modern artificial intelligence and the proliferation of specialized data-annotation startups have diminished demand for legacy micro-task platforms. Employee advocacy groups noted that Amazon had reduced resources dedicated to MTurk as competing platforms gained ground. The sunsetting reflects Amazon's ongoing portfolio rationalization to focus capital and computing resources on modern AI infrastructure and higher-margin enterprise cloud offerings. Separately, retail market data highlighted Amazon's growing competitive dominance in e-commerce, showing its share of U.S. clothing spending expanded from 8.5% in 2019 to 17% in 2025.