Amazon Web Services announced it will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk starting July 30, 2026. The service, launched in 2005 with the tagline 'Artificial Artificial Intelligence,' will remain available to existing users but will no longer receive updates or new features. The move coincides with the closure of related services like SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI to new customers on the same date.
According to AWS, the decision reflects a strategic shift in how companies access human labor for AI training and data annotation. The platform originally paid people to perform tasks that were difficult for machines to handle. In 2018, AWS repositioned Mechanical Turk as a data annotation tool for AI training as part of its SageMaker suite.
A 2023 study revealed that many crowdworkers were using language models themselves, which weakened the platform's role as a source of human-generated data. Today, AI labs increasingly rely on specialized vendors like Scale AI or Surge AI, which employ experts to handle complex tasks and quality assessments. Source: thedecoder
