Amazon Mechanical Turk Stops Accepting New Users as AI Renders Platform Obsolete

Quick Facts

• Amazon Mechanical Turk will stop accepting new customers on July 30, 2026, after AWS added it to its “Services in Maintenance” list earlier this year.
• A 2023 study found that between 33% and 46% of MTurk workers were using large language models to complete the tasks they were being paid to perform as humans.
• AWS says existing customers can continue using the service but confirms no new features will be introduced.

Amazon is winding down one of its oldest platforms. The company announced that Mechanical Turk will stop accepting new customers on July 30, 2026, placing the 21-year-old crowdsourcing service firmly in maintenance mode.

AWS said the decision was made “after careful consideration” and confirmed that Mechanical Turk will stop accepting jobs for SageMaker and all other tasks. Existing customers can keep using the platform, but AWS stated plainly it has no plans to introduce new features.

Amazon launched Mechanical Turk in November 2005, making it older than AWS’s core cloud business, which debuted in 2006. The platform was named after an 18th-century chess machine that was claimed to be fully automated but was secretly operated by a human hidden inside.

The concept proved apt. Mechanical Turk paid workers small amounts to complete simple tasks that resisted full automation, things like solving CAPTCHAs, labeling images, or flagging sentiment in text. At its peak, hundreds of thousands of workers worldwide earned fractions of a cent per task.

The platform tried to stay relevant. In 2018, AWS repositioned Mechanical Turk as a data labeling solution for machine learning, integrating it with SageMaker to supply human-annotated training data for AI models. That pivot did not hold.

The reason is straightforward. A 2023 study found that between 33% and 46% of MTurk workers were using large language models to finish the tasks they were hired as humans to complete. If the human input being sold on the platform was increasingly being produced by AI, the value for businesses paying for human-verified annotations collapsed.

Amazon’s own tools accelerated the decline. SageMaker Ground Truth offers automated labeling with minimal human oversight, effectively replacing what Mechanical Turk’s workforce once provided. Modern machine learning approaches like self-supervised learning also require far fewer human annotations than earlier methods did.

Amazon has committed billions to generative AI, including a $4 billion investment in Anthropic. That is where Amazon sees its AI future, not in paying gig workers pennies to classify data.

The platform’s history carries some weight beyond its business function. Mechanical Turk became a flashpoint in debates over gig economy labor practices and digital piecework ethics. Workers, called Turkers, earned roughly $7 per hour in 2019, typically spending five to eight hours per week on tasks. Many built years of reputation and workflow history on the platform.

The platform also had a darker chapter. During the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal, researchers used Mechanical Turk to recruit over 240,000 people, paying them small amounts to install a Facebook-connected app and answer personal questions. The exercise covertly gathered personal data at scale.

On Reddit’s r/mturk community, reaction to the news was muted. One user wrote that the service had effectively been “dead” for years, with Amazon closing worker accounts without explanation. “Mturk helped me get started on online gig work, so I’m grateful for it just for that,” wrote user Bermin299.

AWS has not disclosed how many active customers remain on the platform or provided a timeline for a complete shutdown. For now, the service that once put human intelligence inside the machine will continue in a reduced state, sustained by existing users until the remaining demand fades.

Read more: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service now on life support as it stops accepting new users