Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk launched on November 2, 2005 with a description that inverted the usual arrangement: instead of a person asking a computer to do something, a computer program could ask a human being to perform a task and return the result. Amazon's own announcement offered the API as a way to integrate Artificial Artificial Intelligence into a program's processing, and the name came from the 18th-century chess automaton that turned out to have a man folded inside it. For nearly twenty-one years MTurk did the work machines could not: labeling images, transcribing audio, deciding whether two listings described the same product, answering the surveys that fill social science journals. The platform advertised more than 500,000 workers across over 190 countries, paid by the task, and a great deal of the labeled data that taught modern models to see and read began as exactly this kind of piecework. The end was quiet and had been arriving for years. Better-funded data-labeling firms recruited the same workers at better rates, Amazon closed the service to new customers on July 30, 2026, and the notice that went up on MTurk's own homepage is a single sentence: Amazon Mechanical Turk will permanently close on September 30, 2026. Amazon gave no reason beyond regularly evaluating its tools, programs, and services. The tidy reading is that artificial intelligence finally ate the humans who had been standing in for it, and the tidy reading is wrong in the one respect worth recording here. They were never standing in for the machine. They were teaching it, one cent at a time, and the platform is closing because the lesson took.

Founded

2005-11

Shut down

2026-09-30

Funding raised

Undisclosed

Years alive

21

Founders

Amazon