Amazon Web Services announced the closure of its crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to new customers on July 30, 2026. Existing users may continue operating the service, though it will enter maintenance mode without further feature development. This decision also affects SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI, which face identical restrictions on new sign-ups. The shutdown follows a strategic shift away from general crowdsourcing toward more controlled data annotation methods.
The service launched in 2005 with the tagline “Artificial Artificial Intelligence,” relying on paid workers to complete tasks machines could not handle. By 2018, AWS repositioned the tool for AI training, but a 2023 study revealed that many crowdworkers were using language models themselves. This undermined the platform’s ability to provide genuine human-generated data for machine learning. Modern AI labs now prefer specialised vendors like Scale AI or Surge AI, which employ vetted experts capable of judging complex edge cases. The move reflects a broader industry trend where quality and verification outweigh volume in data collection.
- Existing customers retain access until service termination.
- New sign-ups for related AI tools are also blocked.
- Specialised vendors now dominate the high-quality data market.
