Key facts
- Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service will stop accepting new customers on July 30, 2026.
- Existing customers will be able to continue using the platform.
- Amazon Web Services will not introduce new features for Mechanical Turk.
- The service, launched in 2005, paid users small amounts for simple tasks.
- Mechanical Turk has been used for data annotation to train AI models.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing service launched in 2005, will cease accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. While existing users will be able to continue using the platform, Amazon Web Services indicated that no new features are planned, suggesting the service is being phased out.
Mechanical Turk was designed for humans to perform simple tasks that resisted automation, such as identifying sentiment in text or completing CAPTCHAs. In recent years, it has been utilized for data annotation to train AI models, including those for Amazon's SageMaker service. The platform has also been a subject of ethical debates regarding crowdsourced labor and has been described as an enabler for companies marketing AI products that rely on human workers.
A 2023 analysis revealed that a significant portion of Mechanical Turk workers, between 33% and 46%, were using large language models to complete their tasks. This raised concerns about the reliability of the data generated and the necessity of human involvement in such processes. Following Amazon's announcement, some users on Reddit suggested the platform had already declined due to issues with bots and fraud.