These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Notice for the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will be closed to new customers. says Amazon Web Services 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 largely on life support.
First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid tiny sums to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation — things like completing CAPTCHA challenges or determining the basic sentiment in a sentence.
In its heyday, service was central debates around the ethics of crowdsourced workand indeed played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Starting in 2018, Amazon launched billing it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of the SageMaker AI service.
Mechanical Turk has also been described as the hidden activator for companies receiving a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach to AI, where products marketed as AI are actually powered by the Engineering Turks workforce — even more fitting then the original Mechanical Turk was itself a farce, with a hidden human chess player pretending to be a chess-playing machine.
Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models became even more complex. In a biting irony, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of platform workers used large language models to complete their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of the data annotated on the platform and also whether humans should be in the loop at all.
This week, after Amazon’s decision was made public, a Reddit user suggested the platform died “years ago,” with workers and researchers abandoning it because of bots and fraud. The user was foreseen“Someone at Amazon is going to decide that keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and they’re going to shut down completely.”
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