Amazon to shut down Mechanical Turk, its original AI crowdsourcing platform

Amazon Web Services is shutting down its crowdsourcing service Mechanical Turk to new customers starting July 30, 2026. The change was announced through the AWS Service Availability Updates. Existing customers can keep using the service, but it's moving into maintenance mode with no new features.

SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI are also closing to new customers on the same date. Amazon launched Mechanical Turk in 2005 under the tagline "Artificial Artificial Intelligence." People got paid to complete small tasks that were hard for machines. In 2018, AWS tried to reposition the platform as a data annotation tool for AI training as part of SageMaker.

A 2023 study found that many crowdworkers were using language models themselves, which undermined the platform's value as a source of human-generated data. Today, AI labs tend to rely on specialized vendors like Scale AI or Surge AI, which employ vetted experts who can handle tough edge cases and quality judgments. Why this matters: The sunset of Mechanical Turk signals a shift in the AI data annotation market, where specialized vendors are becoming the go-to choice for high-quality human-generated data.

For developers and businesses, this means they may need to adapt to new platforms and partners to support their AI training needs. The move also raises questions about the long-term viability of crowdsourcing as a viable strategy for collecting training data, and whether companies will prioritize in-house annotation capabilities or rely on third-party vendors. As AI models continue to advance, the demand for high-quality training data will only grow, making this a critical area to watch in the evolving AI ecosystem.