Amazon closes the door to new Mechanical Turk customers: what this means for the AI market

Amazon has announced that, effective 30 July 2026, Mechanical Turk will stop accepting new customers. Existing users will be able to continue using the service.

Amazon Web Services also does not plan to launch new features for the platform, focusing instead on security and accessibility improvements.

Mechanical Turk has long been important for simple manual tasks such as data labelling, content review and other operations that are difficult to fully automate. However, the service has faced years of debate over ethics, bots and data quality.

Why it matters: Amazon’s decision signals a shift in how companies approach large-scale annotation and human-in-the-loop workflows in AI projects.

Do you think such platforms still have a future?

#AI #Amazon #AWS #MachineLearning