Amazon Closes Mechanical Turk to New Customers, Enters Maintenance Mode

Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk on July 30, 2026, according to notices on mturk.com and AWS SageMaker documentation. Existing customers and workers can continue, but AWS commits only to security and availability maintenance—no new features planned. The service, launched in 2005, once anchored academic research and machine learning training pipelines. The closure signals a managed decline rather than outright shutdown, reflecting how AI automation has displaced the human-annotation tasks the platform was built to coordinate.