On August 25, Amazon announced that Mechanical Turk (MTurk) will permanently close on September 30, 2026. The 21-year-old platform, which once had more than 500,000 workers signed up, is shutting down for good. Amazon had already stopped accepting new customers a month earlier, on July 30, a sign the end was coming.
If you’ve used MTurk to recruit study participants or label data, you now have a matter of weeks to find an MTurk alternative.
Why Mechanical Turk Is Closing
Amazon hasn’t offered much explanation beyond saying it “regularly evaluate[s]” its programs and made “adjustments based on those assessments.” But the platform had reportedly been in decline for years, as newer AI-training and research-recruitment services pulled workers away. Two other AWS tools that relied on the MTurk workforce, SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI, are closing the same day.
The Quality Problem MTurk Never Solved
MTurk’s shutdown isn’t just about Amazon retiring an old product; it’s also a reminder of a data quality problem the platform never fully solved. A 2023 study by researchers at EPFL in Switzerland found that as many as 46% of MTurk workers used AI tools to complete a task meant to capture human judgment. For any study relying on genuine human responses, that’s a significant risk, and it doesn’t disappear just because MTurk does. Whichever platform researchers move to next needs a real answer for it.
What This Means If You Relied on MTurk
If you have active studies or workflows on MTurk, you’ll want to:
- Wrap up or migrate active studies before September 30
- Export any data you still need from the platform
- Choose an MTurk alternative ahead of the deadline, rather than scrambling in late September
A Better Alternative to Mechanical Turk
Positly was designed to catch exactly the kind of low-quality and AI-generated responses that made headlines about MTurk. Our proprietary QualityGuard© system automatically deploys 8 different methods to detect and block bots, spammers, and AI-generated responses before they ever reach your study, including AI/bot detection, digital fingerprinting, English-language checks, engagement monitoring, and duplicate prevention.
You’ll also have access to a pool of 10 million+ respondents, so switching platforms doesn’t mean starting your recruitment from zero.
Ready to move your research off Mechanical Turk?
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