Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to stop accepting new customers – and not even AI can save it

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Workers who use OG crowdsourcing platform say AWS is closing accounts

Amazon Web Services will stop accepting new customers for its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service, and not even AI can save it.

Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace that allows users to post gigs, and workers to bid for the chance to do them. The service's name references an 18th-century machine that its inventor claimed could play chess - but which was actually operated remotely by a human.

AWS launched Mechanical Turk in November 2005 – a time when the cloudy concern focused on giving developers access to the functions of Amazon’s retail operations. The outfit’s now-mainstream infrastructure-as-a-service offerings debuted in 2006.

Amazon quickly claimed Mechanical Turk was a hit.

The platform was arguably a pioneer as it pre-dated other crowdsourcing services like Freelancer and Fiverr. In 2018, AWS suggested a new reason to use the service: having humans review and annotate data used to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker service.

Earlier this week, AWS added the Amazon SageMaker AI – Mechanical Turk service to its list of “Services in Maintenance” – AWS-speak for services it will soon retire. The Mechanical Turk website also added a warning that it will “be closed to new customers, effective July 30, 2026. Existing users will not be impacted by this change.”

We checked with Amazon, and the cloud colossus told us that notice means Mechanical Turk will stop accepting jobs for SageMaker and all other tasks.

The end of the OG crowdsourcing platform is therefore in sight.

Amazon hasn’t explained why it’s decided to retire the Turk, although as is often the case it has developed competing services like SageMaker GroundTruth. AWS also allows integration with third party crowdsourcing services.

On a subreddit dedicated to Mechanical Turk, posters suggest the service’s best days are a long way in the past, and that Amazon has been closing workers’ accounts on short notice and without offering detailed explanation for the decision.

Shrinking the crowd of crowdsourced workers seems like a fine way to make Mechanical Turk useless for even its most dedicated customers. ®