Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

In short: Amazon says its Mechanical Turk service will stop taking new customers on July 30, 2026, while existing customers can keep using it.

What happened

Amazon posted a notice saying Mechanical Turk will close to new customers starting July 30, 2026. Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s online marketplace for paid “human tasks,” where people do small jobs that computers struggle with.

Amazon Web Services, the part of Amazon that runs the service, said it made the decision after “careful consideration.” It added that current customers can continue “as normal,” and that Amazon will keep investing in security and keeping the service running. However, it also said it does not plan to add new features.

Mechanical Turk launched in 2005. It became known for tasks like solving CAPTCHAs (the “pick the traffic lights” checks on websites) and labeling text, such as deciding whether a sentence sounds positive or negative. In recent years, Amazon also positioned it as a tool for labeling data to train AI systems, which is like hiring a large group of people to sort and tag photos so a computer can learn what it is seeing.

Why it matters

Mechanical Turk has been a behind-the-scenes tool used by researchers and companies for years, including work connected to AI training. If new customers can no longer join and no new features are coming, it may push more work to other platforms, or change how some AI data is prepared. It also raises questions for workers who relied on the platform for income, and for teams that still use it to quickly get human input.

Source: TechCrunch AI