Amazon will cease accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk on July 30, 2026 while existing users can continue to use the service as usual. The announcement posted on the Mechanical Turk website said the decision followed careful consideration and that AWS will keep investing in security and availability but will not add new features. Launched in 2005 Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace where workers are paid small amounts to complete tasks that remain difficult for automated systems such as CAPTCHA solving or sentiment analysis. The platform has been central to debates about the ethics of crowdsourced labor and has been used to supply annotated data for machine learning models especially through its integration with Amazon SageMaker. In 2018 Amazon began promoting Mechanical Turk as a data annotation service for AI training. A 2023 analysis found that between 33 percent and 46 percent of workers reported using large language models to perform their tasks raising concerns about data quality and the necessity of human oversight. After the decision was made public a Reddit user noted that the service had effectively been abandoned years ago due to bots and fraud predicting that Amazon might eventually shut down the servers entirely. The company has not indicated plans to discontinue the existing service only to stop new sign ups.