Amazon Mechanical Turk Stops Accepting New Customers
The move signals Amazon's gradual withdrawal from a once-prominent crowdsourcing marketplace that has been undermined by automation and fraud.
Reporting from 1 source: GIGAZINE.
Amazon announced it will stop accepting new customers for its crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk as of July 30, 2026. Existing customers can continue using the service, but no new features are planned. The platform, launched in 2005, has faced issues with bot usage and data reliability.
Amazon Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing platform that let businesses hire remote workers for small tasks like CAPTCHA completion and data labeling, will stop accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. Amazon said existing customers can keep using the service, but no new features are coming. Launched in 2005, MTurk at its peak had 500,000 workers. In recent years, researchers found that a large share of workers used large language models to complete tasks, raising questions about the quality of human-annotated data. Amazon had promoted MTurk as part of its SageMaker AI service for training neural networks. On Reddit, longtime users said the platform had become non-functional for workers due to bots and fraud, and that better alternatives like Prolific and Cloud Connect now exist.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.