Amazon's Mechanical Turk to stop accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. Existing customers can continue using the service.
Key facts
- •Amazon's Mechanical Turk will stop accepting new customers on July 30, 2026
- •Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal
- •The service was launched in 2005 as a marketplace for simple tasks
- •Between 33% and 46% of workers used large language models to complete tasks in 2023
- •Amazon will continue to invest in security and availability improvements for Mechanical Turk
- •No new features will be introduced to the service
Amazon's Mechanical Turk will close to new customers on July 30, 2026. The decision was made after careful consideration. Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal.
Service Background
Mechanical Turk was first launched in 2005 as a marketplace where people were paid to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation. It was used for tasks like completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the basic sentiment in a sentence. The service was also used for annotating data to train neural networks as part of Amazon's SageMaker AI service, starting in 2018.
Complications and Decline
Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models grew complicated. A 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform were using large language models to complete their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of data annotated on the platform. A Reddit user suggested that the platform had already died due to bots and fraud, and predicted that Amazon would eventually pull the plug entirely.
Timeline
- 2005Mechanical Turk was first launched
- 2018Amazon began using Mechanical Turk for annotating data to train neural networks
- 2023Analysis found that 33%-46% of workers used large language models to complete tasks
- July 30, 2026Mechanical Turk will close to new customers
This article was independently rewritten by ManyPress editorial AI from reporting originally published by TechCrunch.
