Amazon Mechanical Turk stops new customers on July 30, 2026

Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk on July 30, 2026. "Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal," AWS said, while adding it does not plan to introduce new features.

What did Amazon announce?

Amazon will close Mechanical Turk to new customers on July 30, 2026, and said existing customers can continue to use the service as normal; AWS added the decision came after "careful consideration" and that it does not plan to introduce new features while continuing security and availability improvements. The company framed the move as halting new sign-ups rather than an immediate shutdown for current users.

How did Mechanical Turk evolve over time?

Mechanical Turk launched in 2005 as a marketplace for small paid tasks and later became tied to AI training: beginning in 2018 Amazon billed it as a way to annotate data for SageMaker, and by 2023 analysts found 33% to 46% of workers were using large language models to complete tasks. The service originally matched people to microtasks such as CAPTCHA solving and basic sentiment labeling, and over time it was used both for legitimate data work and for practices critics described as ethically fraught.

The platform has been central to debates about crowdsourced labor and even "played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal," the company history shows. Observers have also described Mechanical Turk as an enabler for companies that used human workers to simulate automated systems while underlying work migrated toward annotation for machine learning.

Why it matters

Closing new sign-ups matters because Mechanical Turk has been embedded in AI development workflows for years and because its decline affects both researchers and the workforce that performed microtasks. The 2023 analysis that between 33% and 46% of workers were using large language models to complete tasks raises questions about the reliability of annotations and whether humans remain essential in the loop for certain jobs. AWS leaving the service open but frozen in features signals a stop to active product development, not an outright removal of a longstanding tool.

What to watch

Watch for any announcement of a firm retirement date or changes to account access that would confirm Amazon intends to fully retire the service. Also monitor whether researchers and companies move annotation work to alternative platforms after July 30, 2026, and whether any successor services explicitly address the fraud and bot problems users have cited.