Amazon begins wind-down of Mechanical Turk, stops accepting new customers

A recent announcement on the Mechanical Turk website revealed that Amazon will stop accepting new customers for the crowdsourcing service from July 30, 2026. According to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the decision was made after "careful consideration." The company added, "Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. AWS will continue to invest in the security and availability of Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce any new features."

While Amazon is not shutting the platform down entirely, the move signals that Mechanical Turk is entering its final phase. At its peak, the service was at the centre of debates surrounding the ethics of crowdsourced labour and even played a minor role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

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Since 2018, Amazon has positioned Mechanical Turk as a data annotation platform for training AI models through its SageMaker service. Beyond that, the platform has also been criticised for quietly powering AI products that relied heavily on human workers behind the scenes, allowing some companies to market services as AI-driven even when much of the work was performed manually. Ironically, the practice echoed the original "Mechanical Turk"—an 18th-century hoax in which a hidden human, rather than a machine, played chess.

Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI evolved into something of an irony. A 2023 analysis found that between 33 and 46 percent of workers on the platform were themselves using large language models to complete assigned tasks. The finding raised fresh concerns about the reliability of the annotated data being used to train AI systems, while also prompting questions about whether human workers were still necessary in parts of the annotation process.

The decision to scale back the platform also appears to have been influenced by economics. As demand declined and concerns over bots, fraud, and data quality continued to grow, Mechanical Turk increasingly became a financial burden for Amazon, reducing its long-term value as a crowdsourcing platform.