Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to stop accepting new customers – and not even AI can save it

Insight summary

• •Amazon Web Services (AWS) will stop accepting new customers on its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform effective July 30, 2026.
• •Existing users of Mechanical Turk will not be impacted by the closure to new customers.
• •Mechanical Turk allows users to post gigs and workers to bid for tasks, mainly used for annotating data for AI training.
• •AWS has listed Mechanical Turk as a 'Service in Maintenance,' signaling its upcoming retirement.
• •The company has not officially explained the retirement but offers alternative AI data labeling services like SageMaker GroundTruth.
• •Reports indicate AWS has been closing some Mechanical Turk worker accounts without detailed explanation.
• •Mechanical Turk, launched in 2005, was one of the pioneering crowdsourcing services but is now being phased out in favor of newer solutions.