Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

These may be the last days for Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Announcement regarding Mechanical Turk website It says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will approach new customers. Amazon Web Services says The decision was made after “careful consideration,” adding: “Existing customers can continue to use the service as usual. AWS continues to invest in security and availability improvements for Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features.”

In other words, Amazon is not completely shutting down the service, but the service is largely on life support.

First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid small amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation — things like completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying key emotions in a sentence.

In its heyday, the service was at the centre Discussions about teamwork ethicsand even She played a small role In the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

And starting in 2018, Amazon also started Billing is a way for companies to annotate data To train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.

Less explicitly, mechanical abandonment has also been described as Hidden empowerment For companies that take a Fake it til you make it The AI ​​approach, where products marketed as AI are actually implemented by the Turkish mechanical workforce – has become more relevant since Original mechanical Turk It was itself a sham, in which a hidden human chess player pretends to be a chess-playing machine

Over time, the relationship between mechanical Turk models and AI models has become more complex. In a The mockery of a snake eating its own tailA 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks, Which raises questions about the reliability of the data annotated on the platform And also about whether humans need to be in the loop at all.

This week, after Amazon’s decision became public, one Reddit user suggested that the platform died “years ago,” with workers and researchers abandoning it due to bots and fraud. user anticipation“Someone at Amazon will decide that keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and will pull the plug completely.”