Amazon prepares to shut down its legendary Mechanical Turk service

Amazon has announced that it will stop accepting new customers for its long-standing crowdsourcing platform, Mechanical Turk (MTurk). This decision signals a major shift in the digital labor market during an era of unprecedented advancement in AI and automation technologies. Starting July 30, 2026, the service will be closed to new users, which is seen as a sign of the platform's gradual phase-out. This is reported by Techcrunch.com .

Representatives from Amazon Web Services (AWS) stated that this decision was made after careful consideration and analysis. Existing customers can continue to use the service as usual, but the company does not plan to add new features to the platform. AWS will limit its involvement to ensuring security and system stability, meaning the Mechanical Turk project has entered a "life support" mode.

Human labor at the foundation of AI

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was considered a revolutionary project at the time. It brought together thousands of remote workers to perform tasks that were complex for computers but simple for humans (such as solving CAPTCHA codes or identifying emotions in text). The platform is named after the famous 18th-century "Turk" device, which was known as a chess-playing automaton that actually had a human hidden inside.

In recent years, Amazon has been using this service to label data for training neural networks like SageMaker AI. Although many startups advertise their products as "fully automated AI," behind the scenes, Mechanical Turk workers were often performing those tasks manually. This created a unique system of "hidden labor" in the technology world.

Reasons for the crisis: Bots and distrust

Several factors have damaged the reputation of the Mechanical Turk platform. First, studies conducted in 2023 showed that between 33% and 46% of workers on the platform had started using large language models like ChatGPT to perform their tasks. This called into question the reliability of the data that required human input.

Second, due to the proliferation of fraud and bots on the platform, many researchers and serious clients have left the service. According to Reddit users, maintaining MTurk servers is no longer economically efficient for Amazon. The fact that AI itself has begun to analyze data faster and cheaper than humans has sealed the fate of this service.

Mechanical Turk was also indirectly involved in the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal. Now, the closure of this platform signals the end of an era in the digital economy. For many specialists, such platforms served as a source of remote income, but modern AI tools are now fully taking over such micro-tasks.