Amazon Web Services has announced that Mechanical Turk will no longer accept new customers after July 30, 2026. Current users will still be able to continue working on the platform, while AWS says it will keep focusing on security and availability improvements without adding new features.
Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk became known as a crowdsourcing marketplace for small, repetitive tasks that were difficult to automate, such as CAPTCHA solving and basic text classification. Over time, it also became part of wider conversations about digital labor, data annotation, and the early evolution of AI workflows.
In later years, Amazon positioned the service as a tool for companies using SageMaker to label data for machine learning models. At the same time, the platform reflected a changing tech landscape, where human input and automated systems increasingly overlapped in surprising ways.
The decision marks a new phase for one of the internet's most recognizable crowdwork platforms. As AI systems continue to advance, the role of human-assisted data work may shift toward more specialized, higher-value forms of collaboration in the future.