Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk to new users
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a platform used since 2005 to perform micro-tasks such as image captioning, captcha solving, and sentiment analysis of text, will no longer be available to new users starting July 30th, 2026. In its 21 years of existence, Mechanical Turk became the go-to solution for crowd sourcing data labeling for AI systems. But now, AI can do it on its own.
On July 30th, 2026, Amazon will cease allowing new signups to its Mechanical Turk platform, which was created in 2005 for performing microtasks such as image captioning, captcha solving, and sentiment analysis of text. Current users will still be able to use the platform, but there won’t be any further development. Essentially, the platform will be going into “maintenance” until it shuts down completely.
Amazon has been promoting Mechanical Turk as a platform for data annotation for AI since 2018. Ironically, according to a recent 2023 study, 33–46% of workers were already using LLMs to perform these tasks, effectively having AI label the data that would be used to train other AIs.
The shutdown of Mechanical Turk marks the end of an era where humans played a central role in the data pipeline. Tasks that used to be performed by millions of low paid workers are now being automated via synthetic pipelines and AI models. Data quality and pipeline design are now the key factors in the data industry.
Source: techcrunch.com
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Author
Evgenii Arsentev
PhD · Chief Executive Officer, digital health
Articles · Latest articles