Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

Amazon has announced that it will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk, its crowdsourcing marketplace, effective July 30, 2026. The decision, communicated via the Mechanical Turk website, was made after "careful consideration." Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal, and while AWS says it will continue to invest in security and availability, it does not plan to introduce new features, indicating the service is being placed 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, such as completing CAPTCHAs or identifying sentiment in sentences. The service was once at the center of debates around the ethics of crowdsourced labor and played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. In 2018, Amazon began billing it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service. Mechanical Turk 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 powered by human workers. The relationship between the platform and AI grew more complicated over time, with a 2023 analysis finding that between 33% and 46% of workers were using large language models to complete their tasks. Following the announcement, one Reddit user suggested the platform died "years ago" due to bots and fraud, predicting Amazon would eventually pull the plug entirely.