Amazon Shuts Mechanical Turk to New Customers on July 30, 2026 as AI Undercuts Its Role

3 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Jul 5

July 30, 2026 is the cutoff date for new Mechanical Turk customers, while existing users can keep using the Amazon crowdsourcing service.
AWS said it will keep investing in security and availability but plans no new features, signaling the 2005 platform is being maintained rather than expanded.
A 2023 analysis found 33% to 46% of Mechanical Turk workers were using large language models for tasks, compounding concerns about annotation reliability alongside bots and fraud.
Mechanical Turk once supplied low-paid human labor for CAPTCHAs, sentiment labeling and later AI training data through SageMaker, but users now say researchers and workers had already been drifting away.

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