Amazon’s Mechanical Turk will close to new customers on July 30, 2026, following a decision made after “careful consideration,” according to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Existing customers can continue to use the service without interruption, but AWS noted no new features will be introduced.
Mechanical Turk, launched in 2005, served as a marketplace for simple tasks that resisted full automation, including completing CAPTCHA challenges and sentiment analysis. At its peak, the platform was central to ethical debates surrounding crowdsourced labor and was linked to the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
In 2018, Amazon promoted Mechanical Turk as a tool for companies seeking to annotate data for training neural networks through its SageMaker AI service. The service has been described as enabling businesses to present their AI products as fully automated, despite their reliance on human workers.
A 2023 analysis indicated that between 33% and 46% of Mechanical Turk workers leveraged large language models for their tasks. This raises concerns about the reliability of data annotated on the platform and the necessity of human labor.
Amid the announcement of the service’s future, a Reddit user remarked that Mechanical Turk had effectively ceased to function “years ago,” attributing its decline to bots and fraud. The user predicted Amazon may ultimately decide to shut down the platform entirely.
