Amazon to stop accepting new Mechanical Turk customers on July 30, 2026

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that it will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing marketplace, effective July 30, 2026. The decision was disclosed in an announcement on the Mechanical Turk website and attributed to AWS, which stated it was made after 'careful consideration.' Existing customers will continue to use the service as normal, but AWS confirmed it does not plan to introduce new features. The company will focus on security and availability improvements for current users.

Mechanical Turk, first launched in 2005, was designed as a marketplace where people could perform small, repetitive tasks that were difficult to automate, such as completing CAPTCHAs or labeling data. Over time, it became a central platform for debates about the ethics of crowdsourced labor and played a minor role in early discussions around the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In 2018, Amazon began promoting Mechanical Turk as a tool for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service. This positioned the platform as an enabler for AI development, though it also became associated with companies using human labor to 'fake' AI capabilities in their products.

The relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI further complicated in 2023, when an analysis estimated that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks. This raised concerns about the reliability of data annotated via the platform and whether human involvement was necessary at all.

The announcement follows observations from users and observers that the platform had been in decline for years, with workers and researchers reportedly abandoning it due to issues like bot activity and fraud. Some predicted the eventual shutdown of Mechanical Turk servers as unsustainable.