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Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk
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These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Key facts
- An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers
- First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid tiny amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation, things like completing CAPTCHA challenges
- AWS continues to invest in security and availability improvements for Mechanical Turk, but they do not plan to introduce new features
- Beginning in 2018, Amazon began billing it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service
Summary
An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. In other words, Amazon isn’t completely pulling the plug, but the service is much on life support. First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid tiny amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation, things like completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the basic sentiment in a sentence. In its heyday, the service was at the center of debates around the ethics of crowdsourced labor, and it even played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. Beginning in 2018, Amazon began billing it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.