Amazon Closes Mechanical Turk to New Customers July 30, 2026

Amazon Mechanical Turk, launched in 2005 and repositioned in 2018 as a tool for humans to review and annotate data training neural networks via SageMaker, is being wound down. TechCrunch reports that AWS has added the service to its 'Services in Maintenance' list and will close it to new customers on July 30, 2026. Existing customers can keep using it, but AWS says it does not plan to introduce new features beyond security and availability work.

The company statement is deliberately thin. '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,' AWS told the outlet. There is no public explanation for the retirement, though Amazon has its own annotation service in SageMaker Ground Truth, which reads like the intended internal landing pad for existing MTurk requesters.

Why this matters if you don't ship crowdsourced labels: MTurk sat underneath a lot of the human annotation that shaped early AI training pipelines, and its move to maintenance mode is the visible end of a workflow that dedicated labeling vendors and AI-assisted annotation have been quietly displacing. Worker communities told TechCrunch the platform 'died "years ago," with workers and researchers abandoning it due to bots and fraud,' and one Reddit poster predicted 'someone at Amazon is going to decide keeping the Mturk servers running is a waste of time and resources and pull the plug entirely.'

The honest caveat is that this is a stop on new customers, not a shutdown, and Amazon has not disclosed a final sunset date, active user counts, or what happens to worker reputation histories and requester balances when the plug does get pulled. The forward-looking piece is who benefits: standalone data-labeling vendors pick up displaced requesters and workers, SageMaker Ground Truth absorbs the ones already inside AWS, and any team still quietly depending on MTurk for evaluation or fine-tuning data now has a firm reason to migrate before 'no new features' turns into a shutdown notice.