Jul 06, 2026 12:07:00

Amazon's crowdsourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, has stopped accepting new customers.

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing platform that allows you to perform on-demand tasks by hiring cloud workers located in remote areas. Amazon has announced that it will stop accepting new MTurk customers as of July 30, 2026.

Using the Amazon Mechanical Turk Workforce - Amazon SageMaker AI
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/sms-workforce-management-public.html

Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/05/amazon-will-stop-accepting-new-customers-for-mechanical-turk/

In its developer guide for MTurk, Amazon announced that it would stop accepting new customers, explaining, 'After careful consideration, we have decided to discontinue new customer access to MTurk on July 30, 2026. Existing customers can continue to use the service as usual. AWS will continue to invest in improving the security and availability of MTurk, but there are no plans to introduce new features.'

Launched in 2005, MTurk is a platform where people can earn small rewards by crowdsourcing simple tasks that are difficult to fully automate, such as completing CAPTCHA verification or identifying the basic sentiment of text.

It was revealed that at its peak, the company employed as many as 500,000 workers.

500,000 people are working via Amazon's crowdsourcing platform to train AI - GIGAZINE

by Ricardo Diaz

Since 2018, Amazon has been promoting MTurk as part of Amazon SageMaker AI , a means for companies to annotate data and train neural networks.

A 2023 analysis revealed that 33–46% of MTurk users were completing tasks using large-scale language models (LLMs). This raised doubts about the reliability of data annotated in MTurk, and even questioned whether human involvement was necessary for the work being done in MTurk in the first place.

Following Amazon's announcement that it would stop accepting new MTurk customers, comments on the social forum Reddit included: 'MTurk has effectively ceased to function for workers for several years now. Given the bots and fraud rampant throughout MTurk, it has become largely useless for researchers. Both workers and researchers can use far superior platforms like Prolific and Cloud Connect,' and 'Someone at Amazon will decide that keeping MTurk's servers running is a waste of time and resources and will shut down the service completely.'