Amazon stops accepting new customers on Mechanical Turk

This may be the last day for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

According to an announcement on Mechanical Turk’s website, the crowdsourcing service will stop accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. Amazon Web Services said the decision was made after “careful consideration,” adding: “Existing customers will continue to use the service as usual. AWS continues to invest in improving the security and availability of Mechanical Turk, but there are no plans to introduce new features.”

In other words, Amazon isn’t completely out, but the service is very much on life support.

First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid small amounts of money for completing simple tasks that resisted full automation, such as completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying basic emotions in sentences.

In its heyday, the service was at the center of debates over the ethics of crowdsourcing work, and even played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Amazon also began charging companies in 2018 as part of its SageMaker AI service to annotate data and train neural networks.

Less overtly, Mechanical Turk has also been described as a hidden enabler for companies that take a disguised and perfected approach to AI. There, products sold as AI are actually run by Mechanical Turk employees. That’s all the more fitting since the original Mechanical Turk itself was a sham, using hidden human chess players pretending to be chess-playing machines.

Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models has become more complex. In a snake-eating-its-own-tail irony, a 2023 analysis found that 33% to 46% of workers on the platform were using large-scale language models to complete tasks, raising questions about the trustworthiness of the data annotated on the platform and whether humans should be in the loop at all.

After Amazon’s decision became public this week, one Reddit user suggested that the platform had been dead “years ago,” abandoned by workers and researchers for bots and scams. This user predicted, “Someone at Amazon will decide that keeping the Mturk server running is a waste of time and resources and will retire it completely.”