Amazon's crowdsourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, has stopped accepting new customers. - GIGAZINE

Amazon has announced that it will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk, its crowdsourcing platform for microtasks, effective July 30, 2026. The company made the announcement in an update to the platform's developer guide, as reported by multiple news outlets. The change was noted in the developer guide as a policy update.

Mechanical Turk is a marketplace where requesters can post small tasks—such as image labeling, data transcription, and content filtering—that are completed by a distributed workforce for small payments per task. The platform has been a key source of training data for artificial intelligence models, particularly in fields like computer vision and natural language processing. According to the announcement, existing customers will continue to have access to the service.

The decision comes as AI models have become more capable of performing tasks that previously required human input, reducing demand for microtask labor. Amazon has not provided a specific reason for the change beyond the developer guide update. The move is likely to affect researchers and businesses that rely on Mechanical Turk for rapid, low-cost data annotation. The platform has been a significant part of the online gig economy for many years. Some analysts see this as a sign of the declining need for human data labelers.