
Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk
Quick Answer
Amazon's Mechanical Turk will cease accepting new customers on July 30, 2026, while existing users can continue to access the service.
Quick Take
Amazon's Mechanical Turk will cease accepting new customers on July 30, 2026, while existing users can continue to access the service. Originally launched in 2005, the platform has faced criticism for ethical concerns and is increasingly reliant on AI, with a 2023 analysis showing 33-46% of workers using large language models for tasks.
Key Points
- Mechanical Turk will close to new customers on July 30, 2026.
- The service was launched in 2005, focusing on simple, non-automatable tasks.
- 33-46% of Mechanical Turk workers used large language models for their tasks in 2023.
- The platform has faced abandonment due to issues with bots and fraud.
- Amazon plans no new features, focusing only on security and availability improvements.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readThese may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. Amazon Web Services says the 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 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 also began billing it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.
Less overtly, Mechanical Turk has also been described as the hidden enabler for companies taking a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to AI, where products marketed as Ai are actually being performed by the Mechanical Turk workforce — all the more fitting since the original Mechanical Turk was 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 a snake-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 platform and 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 user predicted, “Someone at Amazon is going to decide keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and pull the plug entirely.”
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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 emailing anthony.ha@techcrunch.com.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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