Skip to content

Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

TechCrunch · 2026-07-06

These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

An announcement onthe Mechanical Turk websitesays that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers.Amazon Web Services saysthe decision was made after “careful consideration,” adding, “Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. 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 isn’t completely pulling the plug, but the service is very 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 ofdebates around the ethics of crowdsourced labor, and it evenplayed a small rolein the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Beginning in 2018, Amazon beganbilling it as a way for companies to annotate datato train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.

Mechanical Turk has also been described asthe hidden enablerfor companies taking afake-it-till-you-make-itapproach to AI, where products marketed as AI are actually powered by the Mechanical Turk workforce — all the more fitting sincethe original Mechanical Turkwas itself a hoax, with a hidden human chess player pretending to be a chess-playing machine.

Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models grew even more complicated. In asnake-eating-its-own-tail irony, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks,raising questions about the reliability of data annotated on the platformand also about whether humans needed to be in the loop at all.

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

Topics

When you purchase through links in our articles,we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.

You can contact or verify outreach from Anthony by emailinganthony.ha@techcrunch.com.

Last chance to save up to $190 on TechCrunch Founder Summit. Join 1,000+ founders and VCs at all stages for real-world scaling insights and connections that move the needle.Savings end June 26, 11:59 p.m. PT.

  • Chevy built an all-American EV truck — why is nobody buying it?Tim De Chant

Chevy built an all-American EV truck — why is nobody buying it?

Chevy built an all-American EV truck — why is nobody buying it?

  • Tim De Chant
  • Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven’t progressed as quickly as he’d hopedLucas Ropek

Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven’t progressed as quickly as he’d hoped

Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that AI agents haven’t progressed as quickly as he’d hoped

  • Lucas Ropek
  • Jersey Mike’s IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has becomeJulie Bort

Jersey Mike’s IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become

Jersey Mike’s IPO illustrates how bad the AI hype has become

  • Julie Bort
  • After $18B IPO, Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luckAnna Heim

After $18B IPO, Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luck

After $18B IPO, Bending Spoons founder says success comes from minimizing luck

  • Anna Heim
  • The ‘Father of the Internet’ is finally retiringTim Fernholz

The ‘Father of the Internet’ is finally retiring

The ‘Father of the Internet’ is finally retiring

  • Tim Fernholz
  • OpenClaw is finally available on Android and iOSLucas Ropek

OpenClaw is finally available on Android and iOS

OpenClaw is finally available on Android and iOS

  • Lucas Ropek
  • Flipper Device’s new Busy Bar is a customizable display for productivityIvan Mehta

Flipper Device’s new Busy Bar is a customizable display for productivity

Flipper Device’s new Busy Bar is a customizable display for productivity

  • Ivan Mehta