Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

These may be the last days for Amazon Mechanical Turk.

An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new clients. Amazon Web Services says the decision was made after “careful consideration,” adding: “Existing customers can continue to use the service as usual. AWS continues to invest in security and availability improvements for Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features.”

In other words, Amazon is not completely shutting down the service, but the service is largely on life support.

First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid small amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation — things like completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying key emotions in a sentence.

In its heyday, the service was at the center of debates about crowdsourced ethics, even playing a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Starting in 2018, Amazon also began touting it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.

Less explicitly, Mechanical Turk has also been described as a hidden enabler of companies taking a fake-it-it-t-make-it approach to AI, where products marketed as AI are actually implemented by the Mechanical Turk workforce – which is all the more appropriate given that the original Mechanical Turk was itself a scam, with a hidden human chess player pretending to be a chess-playing machine.

Over time, the relationship between mechanical Turk models and AI models has become more complex. In an interesting twist, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of the data annotated on the platform and also about whether humans need to be in the loop at all.

This week, after Amazon’s decision became public, one Reddit user suggested that the platform died “years ago,” with workers and researchers abandoning it due to bots and fraud. The user predicted that “someone at Amazon will decide that keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and will pull the plug completely.”