One of the internet’s oldest gig-economy machines is switching itself off. Amazon posted a notice saying Mechanical Turk, the marketplace where businesses hired remote workers for small digital chores, will close permanently on September 30 after a routine review of its programs.
Workers still holding approved tasks will be paid. The company’s wind-down guide tells them to check their payment details and schedules in the worker portal, and confirms that completed Human Intelligence Tasks will be disbursed on the usual cycle, with tax paperwork handled through the standard deadlines.
New assignments stop on the closure date and anything unsubmitted simply expires. Requesters keep a 30-day window after that to approve or reject the work already turned in, after which pending tasks are automatically approved, and they can hand out bonuses until the same October 30 cutoff. Prepaid balances come back within 30 days, and the last AWS bill follows.
Amazon once marketed the service as Artificial Artificial Intelligence, a phrase that captured its role as a human power supply for software that could not yet see or read on its own. Launched in 2005, it became a training-ground for machine learning, paying people pennies to label images, transcribe audio and filter content that would later teach models how to do those jobs automatically.
The shutdown lands as that original purpose has largely been absorbed by dedicated data-labeling firms and by models that generate their own training signal. For academics and small teams still leaning on Turk for cheap human judgment, the remaining weeks are a scramble to find another pipeline.
