Amazon to Stop Accepting New Customers for Mechanical Turk

Amazon has announced that its crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk will stop accepting new customers from July 30, 2026. According to Amazon Web Services, the decision was made after “careful consideration.” Existing customers will still be able to use the service, and AWS will continue to invest in security and availability improvements, but no new features are planned.

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid small amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation, such as completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying sentiment in a sentence. At its peak, the service was at the center of debates about the ethics of crowdsourced labor and played a role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Beginning in 2018, Amazon also promoted Mechanical Turk as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service. However, the platform has also been described as a hidden enabler for companies taking a “fake-it-till-you-make-it” approach to AI, where products marketed as AI were actually performed by Mechanical Turk workers. This is ironic because the original Mechanical Turk was itself a hoax—a hidden human chess player pretending to be a machine.

Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI became more complicated. 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 data reliability and whether humans were needed at all. After Amazon’s announcement, a Reddit user suggested the platform “died years ago,” with workers and researchers abandoning it due to bots and fraud. The user predicted that eventually someone at Amazon will decide that keeping the Mechanical Turk servers running is a waste of resources and shut it down entirely.