Amazon to Stop New Customer Sign-Ups for Mechanical Turk

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

An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website reveals that starting July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing platform will no longer accept new customers. Amazon Web Services indicated that this choice was made after “careful consideration,” stating, “Existing customers can continue using the service as usual. AWS remains focused on improving security and availability for Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features.”

Essentially, Amazon is not fully shutting down the service, but it is undoubtedly in a vulnerable position.

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk acted as a marketplace where users were paid small amounts to complete simple tasks that were hard to automate — such as solving CAPTCHA puzzles or identifying the main sentiment in a sentence.

At its height, the platform was central to conversations about the ethics of crowdsourced labor and even had a minor role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Beginning in 2018, Amazon started promoting it as a resource for businesses to annotate data for training neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.

Less overtly, Mechanical Turk has been perceived as a covert enabler for companies that employ a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach in AI, where products marketed as AI are actually powered by the Mechanical Turk workforce — a fitting analogy considering that the original Mechanical Turk was itself a ruse, featuring a hidden human chess player posing as a chess machine.

Over time, the link between Mechanical Turk and AI models has become more complex. In an ironic twist, a 2023 study found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to perform their tasks, raising concerns about the reliability of data annotated on the platform and questioning whether human input was genuinely necessary.

This week, following Amazon’s announcement, a Reddit user noted that the platform had essentially “died years ago,” with workers and researchers departing due to bots and fraudulent behavior. The user predicted, “Someone at Amazon is going to decide that keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and will shut it down completely.”