Amazon to Shut Down Mechanical Turk as LLMs Absorb Its Micro-Task Workloads

Amazon will permanently close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026, ending a crowdsourcing service launched in 2005. Jeff Bezos once called it "artificial AI." Large language models now handle many micro-tasks — text classification, content moderation, sentiment scoring — that the platform routed to human workers, formalizing a market shift toward structured annotation platforms.