en.Wedoany.com Reported - Amazon Web Services (AWS) has stopped accepting new customers for its Mechanical Turk service, which has been operating for nearly two decades, signaling that this pioneering crowdsourcing marketplace may be coming to an end.
Mechanical Turk was launched in 2005, a year before AWS's public cloud infrastructure business. The platform serves as a crowdsourcing marketplace where users can post gig tasks, such as identifying CAPTCHAs or judging sentence sentiment, which are difficult to automate easily through other means, and others can bid to complete them. Its name is derived from an 18th-century chess machine that claimed to be fully automated but was actually secretly operated by a human chess master hidden inside.
In its early stages, Mechanical Turk achieved significant success and sparked widespread discussions about the ethics of crowdsourced labor. The platform was also involved in the Cambridge Analytica data controversy that affected Facebook. It predated other gig marketplaces like Freelancer and Fiverr, and later evolved into an artificial intelligence training tool. In 2018, Amazon began encouraging humans to label and review data used to train neural networks for the AWS SageMaker service.
However, Amazon appears to have deemed Mechanical Turk no longer valuable. The service is currently in "maintenance" mode, suggesting it may be shut down. On its official website, Amazon states that the service "will be closed to new customers as of July 30, 2026, and existing users will not be affected by this change." AWS confirmed to The Register that Mechanical Turk will no longer accept gigs for SageMaker or any other tasks. According to TechCrunch, this veteran crowdsourcing platform has entered a state of decline and is likely to be fully shut down soon.
Although Amazon has not officially declared the platform dead, it clearly no longer needs it. The company now offers SageMaker Ground Truth as an alternative service for collecting machine learning data, while the AWS cloud also supports integration with third-party crowdsourcing platforms.
On Reddit's r/mturk subreddit, some users noted that the service "has been dead for years," with Amazon seemingly closing worker accounts randomly without detailed explanations. User Bermin299 wrote: "Mturk helped me start my online gig work, and I am grateful for that. The money I earned from Mturk back then really helped me through tough times, and I am equally thankful. It's like watching an old friend who has long passed their expiration date finally rest in peace."
