Amazon Sunsets Crowd-Sourced Work Platform MTurk

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 30, 2026.”

The closure was flagged in a report by CNBC, which notes that Mechanical Turk connects workers with “Human Intelligence Tasks,” simple digital jobs typically pay out a few cents per task, such as labeling data, answering surveys or transcribing audio or video.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has called the service “artificial artificial intelligence,” as it parceled out jobs that were too tough for computers but could be easily completed by humans. Per a New York Times report, the service takes its name from a chess-playing “robot” from the 1700s that was actually controlled by a human.

While MTurk at one time served more than 500,000 workers — or “turkers” — it has been “in decline,” Krista Pawloski, a data worker and organizer with Turkopticon, an employee advocacy group for data workers, told CNBC.

The report also notes that artificial intelligence (AI) models have rapidly advanced since 2005, with several startups now recruiting workers to train these models.

Pawloski said Amazon seemed to devote fewer resources to improving MTurk as more data labeling services came on the scene, leading many turkers to move to competing platforms.

In other Amazon news, recent PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that the company’s share of U.S. clothing spending has doubled since 2019 while rival Walmart’s has dipped lower, a six-year divergence that was still widening in the first half of this year.

The research estimates that Amazon accounted for 17% of U.S. clothing spending in 2025, up from 8.5% in 2019. Walmart’s share dipped from 7.3% to 6.2% during the same period.

“Walmart’s latest earnings call points to stronger results in parts of its clothing business, although management didn’t report an overall apparel growth rate,” PYMNTS wrote.

Walmart U.S. CEO David Guggina said the company was witnessing strength in fashion and specifically said Scoop and Free Assembly were enjoying triple-digit comparable sales growth.

And as covered here Sunday (Aug. 23), the company is also working on a new line of clothing designed to court younger consumers.