Amazon to Close Mechanical Turk as LLMs Take Over Micro-Task Workloads

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