Amazon Is Shutting Down Mechanical Turk on September 30 After 21 Years

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Amazon confirmed it will close Mechanical Turk, the HIT marketplace Jeff Bezos once called 'artificial artificial intelligence', on 2026-09-30; it stopped accepting new customers in early July. The r/singularity headline credits a study finding 46% of MTurk tasks were done by AI, but that figure comes from a 2023 academic survey of workers using AI tools, not a 2026 measurement, so do not cite it as current. The real displacement story is the middleman collapse the top comment names: if the crowd is quietly running ChatGPT anyway, buyers skip to the model provider, and data startups like Scale, Mercor and Prolific took the rest.