These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
A notice 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 accessibility improvements for Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features.”
In other words, Amazon is not completely pulling the plug, but the service is largely on life support.
First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid small amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation — things like completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the basic sentiment of a sentence.
In its heyday, the service was at the center of debates surrounding the ethics of crowdsourced labor and even played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
As of 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 of companies that take a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to AI, where products marketed as Ai are actually performed by the Mechanical Turk workforce—all the more fitting since the original Mechanical Turk was itself a hoax, in which a hidden human chess player pretended to be a machine.
Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models became even more complicated. In an irony that eats its own tail, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform used large language models to perform their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of data annotated on the platform and also whether humans even needed to be in the loop.
This week, after Amazon’s decision became public, a Reddit user suggested the platform died “years ago,” with workers and researchers leaving it because of bots and scams. The user predicted, “Someone at Amazon will decide keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and pull the plug entirely.”
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