Amazon Mechanical Turk will permanently close on September 30, 2026. The Next Web reported the decision on August 26 after a notice appeared on the service, and Amazon's own AWS documentation now repeats the closure date and tells customers to move affected workflows.
What Amazon has confirmed
The AWS SageMaker documentation says Mechanical Turk will permanently close on September 30 and recommends that users of the MTurk workforce option review their workflows and transition to an alternative before then. The original TNW report says Amazon's public explanation is limited to a regular assessment of programs, tools and services.
That wording confirms the decision and deadline but does not establish a cause. Amazon has not publicly said that generative AI, platform economics, worker supply or regulation independently drove the closure. Those factors may frame the market around MTurk, but they should not be presented as Amazon's explanation.
Why the service mattered
Mechanical Turk connected requesters with people completing Human Intelligence Tasks, commonly called HITs. Typical work included data labeling, surveys, transcription, categorization and content review. Amazon also exposed the workforce through services such as SageMaker Ground Truth and Augmented AI, making MTurk part of some machine-learning data and human-review pipelines.
Its role illustrates a recurring feature of AI systems: automation often depends on human judgment to create labels, review uncertain results or handle exceptions. Closing one marketplace does not remove that work. It changes where it is contracted, how continuity is managed and what safeguards requesters need when moving data and instructions elsewhere.
What requesters should do before the deadline
Teams should inventory every job, API integration and downstream process that names the MTurk workforce. They need to preserve required records, identify unfinished work, test an alternative workforce, update access controls and document how personal or confidential data is handled by the replacement.
Migration is not just an endpoint change. Different services can use different worker qualifications, pricing structures, review rules, geographic coverage and quality controls. A parallel test with representative tasks is safer than assuming output will be equivalent.
Workers face a different transition. The closure removes a place to find assignments and a history tied to that marketplace. Amazon's technical notice does not promise a transfer of reputation, qualifications or work to another provider, so workers should rely on the official FAQ and account notices for payment and record deadlines rather than third-party speculation.
What to watch
The remaining operational details matter most: final dates for creating or completing tasks, how balances and disputes are handled, and which AWS features remove MTurk as an option. Amazon may update documentation as the deadline approaches. Requesters should monitor those pages and validate migrations before September 30.
Sources and methodology
This article uses TNW's August 26 report and Amazon's current SageMaker documentation. It separates Amazon's confirmed closure from analysis about the broader human-data market and does not infer an undisclosed reason for the decision.