Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

These could be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

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

In other words, Amazon isn’t pulling the plug entirely, but the service is very much about life support.

First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid small amounts of money to complete simple tasks that could withstand full automation – things like completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the basic sentiment in a sentence.

In the heyday, service was central debates on the ethics of crowdsourced laborand even it played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

From 2018, Amazon also started billing as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of the SageMaker AI service.

Less overtly, Mechanical Turk is also described as the hidden enabler for companies that have a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to AI, where products marketed as AI are actually implemented by Mechanical Turk’s employees – all the more appropriate since the original mechanical Turk was itself a hoax, with a hidden human chess player masquerading as a chess machine

Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models became even more complicated. Ironically, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform used large language models to perform their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of the data annotated on the platform and also whether people needed to be aware at all.

This week, after Amazon’s decision became public, a Reddit user suggested the platform died “years ago,” with employees and researchers leaving because of bots and fraud. The user predicted“Someone at Amazon is going to decide that running the Mturk servers is a waste of time and resources and pull the plug completely.”