Amazon AWS stops accepting new Mechanical Turk users

Amazon Web Services will stop accepting new customers for its pioneering Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform on July 30, 2026, placing the nearly 21-year-old service into a maintenance mode that signals its likely eventual retirement. The company announced the decision on the service's website, stating it was made after careful consideration and that existing customers can continue to use the service normally.

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk served as a marketplace for "human intelligence tasks"-small, repetitive jobs like identifying objects in photos, transcribing audio, or labeling data that computers struggled to perform. Workers, often paid small sums per task, provided the human judgment necessary for everything from academic research to commercial data processing. The platform's name referenced an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that secretly concealed a human operator, a fitting metaphor for its role in powering systems marketed as automated.

Over its lifespan, Mechanical Turk became a central flashpoint in debates about labor ethics, fair wages, and the hidden human workforce behind technological automation. It also played a documented role in the early stages...