Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk on July 30

2 hours ago

Amazon Mechanical Turk will close to new customers on July 30, 2026, but existing users can continue with no new features added.
The service, launched in 2005, paid workers small amounts for tasks resistant to automation, like CAPTCHA completion or sentiment analysis.
It has been central to debates on crowdsourced labor ethics and was used in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
From 2018, it was marketed for data annotation to train neural networks as part of Amazon's SageMaker AI service.
Mechanical Turk enabled 'fake-it-till-you-make-it' AI approaches, where human workers powered products marketed as AI, mirroring its namesake hoax.
A 2023 analysis found 33%-46% of workers used large language models for tasks, raising data reliability and human-in-the-loop questions.
After Amazon's decision, some on Reddit claim the platform declined years ago due to bots and fraud, predicting eventual full shutdown.

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