Amazon sunsets Mechanical Turk, the original “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”
Amazon sunsets Mechanical Turk, the original “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”
Publish Date: 2026-07-06 07:24:00
Source Domain: the-decoder.com
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) will no longer accept new customers for its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service starting July 30, 2026, according to AWS Service Availability Updates. Existing users can continue to use the service but it will enter maintenance mode without new features.
- Mechanical Turk, launched by Amazon in 2005, initially aimed to fulfill tasks difficult for machines by paying users to complete small tasks. The platform later shifted focus to data annotation for AI training.
- In 2023, a study indicated that many crowdworkers on Mechanical Turk were using language models themselves, thus diminishing the platform’s value as a pure human-generated data source.
- AWS’s SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI are also closing to new customers on the same date as Mechanical Turk.
- The decline in Mechanical Turk’s relevance is partly because AI labs now prefer specialized vendors like Scale AI or Surge AI, which provide vetted and more reliable data through experts.
