Amazon Closes Mechanical Turk to New Customers
Amazon Web Services (AWS) quietly placed its 21-year-old crowdsourcing platform on its official maintenance list and posted a notice on the service homepage detailing upcoming operational changes. The cutoff applies to all new requesters who post tasks and all new workers who want to sign up for gig jobs.
The restriction affects tasks routed through the company's SageMaker integration, including SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI.
Representatives from AWS confirmed to technology news outlets that the decision follows a period of careful consideration.
Amazon posted the following notice on the Mechanical Turk website:
"Amazon Mechanical Turk will be closed to new customers, effective July 30, 2026. Existing users will not be impacted by this change."
Current users can still log in and use the platform to post or complete tasks, but Amazon will no longer build new capabilities for the service. The company will only provide security updates and availability improvements to keep the framework functional for existing accounts.
Amazon Web Services provided an official statement to media outlets regarding the change:
"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."
Amazon launched Mechanical Turk in 2005 as an open online marketplace where businesses paid individuals (freelancers) small fees to complete microtasks that computers struggled to handle. Workers performed manual operations such as sorting images, transcribing audio files, and checking text sentiment.
In 2018, Amazon adjusted the platform focus to emphasize data labeling and data annotation to train machine learning models within the SageMaker cloud ecosystem. Specialized competitors like Scale AI, Surge AI, and Labelbox grew during this period, drawing away market share with specialized data pipelines.
Data quality issues accelerated the drop in platform usage after researchers discovered automated tools infiltrating the workforce.
A June 2023 study by researchers at the Swiss institute EPFL found that between 33% and 46% of Mechanical Turk workers used large language models to complete text assignments.
This rise in text automation defeated the original goal of gathering genuine human input for artificial intelligence training models. Academic researchers and corporate clients reduced their reliance on the marketplace due to the high volume of bots and fraud.
Gig workers shared mixed reactions on the r/mturk community forum following the announcement. Many workers noted that available tasks and payouts had already dropped substantially over the past few years.
A user named Bermin299 shared thoughts on the platform history:
"MTurk helped me get started on online gig work, so I'm grateful for it just for that. The money I made from Mturk back then really helped me out during some tight financial times in the past, which I'm also grateful for. It's like seeing an old friend well past their expiration date finally getting put to rest."
Amazon has not shared data about the total number of active requesters or workers currently using the marketplace. The company did not outline a timeline for a full shutdown or explain what will happen to remaining account balances.
Businesses that currently use the marketplace must look toward alternative systems for their data annotation needs before operations wind down completely. Amazon offers SageMaker Ground Truth Plus as its primary automated alternative for clients requiring verified machine learning data.
