Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

Amazon's crowdsourcing service, which launched in 2005 as a marketplace where workers completed simple automated tasks for small payments, will stop accepting new customers as of July 30, 2026, though existing customers can continue using it. The service became notable in debates about crowdsourced labor ethics and later became integrated into AI development, where companies used it to annotate data for training neural networks. The decision to close to new customers signals the service is declining, as it will no longer receive new features despite Amazon maintaining security improvements. The platform's relevance has been complicated by the emergence of large language models, with a 2023 analysis finding that between 33 and 46 percent of workers were using these models to complete their tasks, raising questions about data reliability.