Amazon will close its Mechanical Turk marketplace, an early microtask crowdsourcing service named for an 18th-century chess machine secretly run by a hidden human, to new customers on July 30, 2026, ending a platform it launched in 2005, according to The Register. AWS added the service to its ‘Services in Maintenance’ list this week, and Amazon confirmed Mechanical Turk will stop taking jobs for both its SageMaker AI data-labeling work and everything else, though existing users aren’t immediately affected. Mechanical Turk had found a second act labeling data to train AI models, but Amazon now pushes competing tools like SageMaker Ground Truth. The company hasn’t said why it’s retiring the service, as workers report their accounts being cut off with little notice.
