This could be Amazon Mechanical Turk’s last day.
The crowdsourcing service will close to new customers on July 30, 2026, according to an announcement on the Mechanical Turk website. Amazon Web Services said the decision was made after “careful consideration,” adding, “Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. AWS continues to invest in improving the security and availability of Mechanical Turk, but we have no plans to introduce new features.”
That means that while Amazon isn’t pulling the plug completely, the service is vital to its life support.
First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid small sums of money to perform simple tasks that couldn’t be fully automated, such as completing CAPTCHA tasks or identifying basic emotions in sentences.
In its heyday, the service was at the center of debates surrounding the ethics of crowdsourcing work and even played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Starting in 2018, Amazon began charging this as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.
Less obviously, Mechanical Turk has also been described as a hidden enabler for companies taking a fake-it-til-you-make approach to AI. Here, products sold as Ai are actually performed by Mechanical Turk personnel. This is even more relevant because the original Mechanical Turk was itself a scam, with hidden human chess players pretending to be machines playing chess.
Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models has become more complex. Ironically, a snake eating its own tail, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of platform workers are using large-scale language models to complete their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of the data annotated on the platforms and whether humans need to be brought into the loop.
After Amazon’s decision was made public this week, one Reddit user suggested that the platform disappeared “years ago” and that employees and researchers had abandoned it due to bots and scams. “Someone at Amazon will decide that keeping Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and will pull the plug entirely,” the user predicted.
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