What happened to Amazon Mechanical Turk, and where its work went

Amazon Mechanical Turk closed for good on September 30, 2026, after 21 years. Approved HITs are still paid on each worker's usual schedule, and Amazon gives workers until October 30, 2026 to check their payment settings. We read Amazon's own closure pages on October 23, 2026.

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What happened to Amazon Mechanical Turk?

Amazon closed it in steps: first to new customers, then for everyone. The dates come from Amazon's own notices, as TechCrunch and CNBC reported them, and from its closure FAQ.

Amazon gave one reason in its notice: "Following an assessment, we've made the decision to close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026," CNBC reported. When it announced in July that it would close to new customers, AWS said existing customers could keep using the service as normal, with no new features planned, TechCrunch reported.

What happens to my Mechanical Turk earnings?

You'll still be paid for approved work. This is what Amazon's closure FAQ tells workers.

To check your settings, Amazon says to make sure you have a payment method and a payment frequency set. If you haven't set a transfer schedule, go to Account Settings, then Manage Payment Preferences, and pick one. After October 30, payment changes go through MTurk Customer Service. If your money doesn't arrive on your usual schedule, Amazon says to contact Customer Service too.

What changes for requesters and AWS users?

Requesters have until October 30, 2026 to verify their payment information in the Requester Portal, so refunds go through on time. A prepaid requester balance should come back in full within 30 days of the September 30 closure. The final bill arrives in the next billing cycles. HITs that nobody submitted expired automatically, and they aren't charged.

The closure also reaches two other AWS services, SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI. Their Mechanical Turk worker type can't be picked for labeling jobs or human review workflows anymore. Amazon's SageMaker guide recommended that users move to another workforce option, and it names private and vendor workforces as the other kinds.

What was Mechanical Turk?

It was a marketplace where businesses posted small online jobs, called Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs. It launched in 2005, and the tasks typically paid a few cents each, CNBC reported, for work like labeling data, transcribing audio or video and answering surveys. Jeff Bezos called it "artificial artificial intelligence." The name came from an 18th-century chess-playing machine secretly worked by a human chess master. At one point it served more than 500,000 workers, according to Amazon.

Each requester decided how much to pay workers for a task. Amazon's own price list, still online under the closure notice, shows its cut: a 20% fee on the reward and any bonus, plus another 20% on tasks with 10 or more assignments.

Why did Amazon close Mechanical Turk?

Amazon didn't give a reason beyond its assessment. A spokesperson told CNBC the company remains "focused on delivering the best possible experience for all our Amazon and AWS customers." Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with the advocacy group Turkopticon, told CNBC that MTurk had been "in decline." She said Amazon seemed to invest less in it as more data labeling services arrived, and many workers moved to competing platforms.

AI models have advanced rapidly since MTurk launched, CNBC notes, and data startups such as Scale AI, Mercor and Prolific now recruit workers to train them. A 2023 study by researchers in Switzerland found that up to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used AI models to complete tasks, which raised questions about the platform's data.

Where did Mechanical Turk's work go?

Its workers have been moving to platforms that pay people to train AI or take part in research, CNBC reported. These three describe that work on their own pages, read October 23, 2026.

DataAnnotation, which works for AI companies and pays through PayPal only, says its general projects start at $25 to $50 an hour. You get one try at its Starter Assessment first. Prolific says it always pays cash, never gift cards or points, and pays instantly to PayPal after your first 4 cash-outs. Microworkers asks for an ID and a selfie once you've earned $1.00, before you can withdraw.

Earning apps like ours. PaysFair pays for surveys, games and campaigns. Its smallest cash-out is $1.00, sent as a gift card by email, and your first cash-out is checked by hand. Tasks done over a VPN or proxy don't count. Our online guide covers testing and other platform work, and our surveys guide shows who pays for a survey before your reward.

What do other guides on this leave out?

We read six pages that rank for Mechanical Turk and its alternatives on October 23, 2026, and four more wouldn't load for us. Three lists of alternatives don't say it closed, and one still gives its average pay as $11 an hour, with no source. Only one page mentions the October 30 deadline. None tells workers to check their payment settings or says their transaction history ends on January 28, 2027. Two Amazon developer guides still in the search results now answer with an error page.