Amazon Mechanical Turk will close to new customers on July 30, 2026, leaving existing users able to continue using the crowdsourcing platform. Amazon Web Services said it will keep investing in security and availability improvements but does not plan to add new features.
The decision does not immediately shut down the service. However, limiting access to existing customers signals that Mechanical Turk is no longer a growth priority for AWS.
Amazon launched Mechanical Turk in 2005 as a marketplace for small tasks that were difficult for computers to complete. The platform allowed businesses, researchers and developers to pay people for work such as image tagging, transcription, data checking and sentiment classification.
A Platform Built Around Human Labour
Mechanical Turk was once described by Amazon as a way to connect software systems with “artificial artificial intelligence.” The name referred to an 18th-century chess-playing machine that appeared automated but was secretly controlled by a human operator.
The platform became central to debates about online piecework because many tasks paid only small amounts. It was also widely used by academic researchers, startups and companies that needed large volumes of human judgments quickly.
Mechanical Turk later became tied to machine-learning workflows. Amazon promoted it as a way to label training data for AI systems, including through Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, which launched in 2018 to help customers create datasets for machine-learning models.
AI Changed the Platform’s Role
Mechanical Turk also became associated with companies that marketed automated products while relying on human workers behind the scenes. That made it a symbol of early AI systems that still depended heavily on hidden labour.
Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI became more complicated. A 2023 study found that between 33% and 46% of workers surveyed on the platform had used large language models to complete assigned tasks, raising questions about data quality and whether the work was still being performed by humans.
Workers and researchers have also complained for years about bots, fraud and declining task quality. After Amazon’s decision became public, some users on Reddit said the service had already lost much of its usefulness before the new customer cutoff.
Mechanical Turk will remain available to existing requesters and workers after July 30. Amazon has not announced a full shutdown date.
Featured image credits: Wikimedia Commons
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