Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk

Amazon announced that its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform will stop accepting new customers starting July 30, 2026, though existing users can continue using the service without new features being added. Mechanical Turk, launched in 2005, has been used for tasks like data annotation and played a role in early AI development and ethical debates around crowdsourced labor. The platform's relevance has declined amid issues like bot fraud and the use of AI by workers to complete tasks.