These may be the last days of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. Amazon Web Services says the decision was made after “careful consideration,” adding: “Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. AWS continues to invest in security and availability improvements for Mechanical Turk, but we do not plan to introduce new features.”

In other words, Amazon isn’t completely pulling the plug, but the service is largely on life support.

First launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people were paid small amounts to perform simple tasks that resisted full automation, such as completing CAPTCHA challenges or identifying the basic sentiment in a sentence.

At its peak, the service was at the center of debates over the ethics of collaborative work, and even played a small role in the early stages of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Starting in 2018, Amazon also began promoting it as a way for companies to annotate data to train neural networks as part of its SageMaker AI service.

Less overtly, Mechanical Turk has also been described as the hidden enabler for companies adopting a fake it ’til you make it approach to AI, where products marketed as Ai are actually made by Mechanical Turk’s workforce, which is even more appropriate since the original Mechanical Turk was itself a hoax, with a hidden human chess player pretending to be a chess-playing machine.

Over time, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models became even more complicated. In an irony of a snake eating its own tail, a 2023 analysis found that between 33% and 46% of platform workers were using large language models to complete their tasks, raising questions about the reliability of the data annotated on the platform and also whether humans needed to be aware.

This week, after Amazon’s decision became public, a Reddit user suggested that the platform died “years ago,” with workers and researchers abandoning it due to bots and fraud. The user predicted: “Someone at Amazon will decide that keeping Mturk’s servers up and running is a waste of time and resources and will take them offline completely.”