AWS Closes Mechanical Turk To New Customers From July 30
The Mechanical Turk website says AWS will stop accepting new Mechanical Turk customers from July 30, 2026, while existing users remain unaffected for now. The notice also applies to SageMaker tasks, but Amazon left the retirement plan and final shutdown date outside the notice.
AWS Sets July 30 Closure For New Mechanical Turk Customers
The Mechanical Turk website says Amazon Web Services will close the service to new customers from July 30, 2026, turning one of Amazon’s earliest developer services into a maintenance-only platform.
The Mechanical Turk website says the service will be closed to new customers from that date and that existing users will not be affected by the change for now.
The Register reported that Amazon confirmed the notice covers SageMaker jobs and all other Mechanical Turk tasks.
Mechanical Turk lets users post small tasks and lets workers bid to complete them.
The report wrote that Amazon launched the service in November 2005, before AWS’s mainstream infrastructure-as-a-service products appeared in 2006.
SageMaker Work Had Extended The Service Into AI Training
Mechanical Turk later found a role in AI training workflows.
The report noted that in 2018 AWS presented the service as a way to have people review and annotate data for neural-network training as part of SageMaker.
AWS has now added Amazon SageMaker AI - Mechanical Turk to its list of services in maintenance.
AWS labelled the closure as a deprecated-service notice for new customers.
The decision narrows an early crowdsourcing option for teams that still rely on human-labelled data.
AWS also has SageMaker GroundTruth and supports third-party crowdsourcing integrations, while migration terms for current Mechanical Turk customers remain outside the notice.
Worker Account Complaints Remain Unresolved
The report also cited user complaints on a Mechanical Turk subreddit.
Posters said Amazon had closed worker accounts on short notice and without detailed explanations.
The service depends on a large available worker pool.
If worker accounts shrink while new customers are blocked, Mechanical Turk becomes harder to use even before a formal shutdown date.
The remaining public gaps are the reason for closing the service to new customers, a final end-of-service date, migration terms for existing users, worker-account appeal details and a customer transition plan.
