Amazon Mechanical Turk to stop new customers in 2026: AWS sets July 30 cutoff

Amazon Web Services (AWS) will stop taking new customers for Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) on July 30, 2026, a significant shift for the service, though existing Requesters and Workers will still be able to use it after that date.

What comes next is maintenance, not expansion. AWS says MTurk will keep getting security and availability updates, but no new features are planned for the platform Amazon Web Services launched in 2005. Back then, it helped popularize Human Intelligence Tasks for surveys, content moderation, data validation, software training, and other small paid jobs.

If you rely on Amazon Mechanical Turk for research or data labeling, this is something to pay attention to.

The service has been losing ground as businesses and researchers raised concerns about data quality, bot activity, fraud, and automated tools. Many have already shifted to competitors with tighter screening and stronger controls.

So a platform that, by some estimates, had at least 250,000 workers worldwide in 2019, especially in India, and that spent years as one of the clearest symbols of the early gig economy, is now being left in maintenance mode. It also shows how shaky platform labor can be.

Amazon Mechanical Turk is still available on the web through AWS for existing users.

New data-labeling customers are being pointed to Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth instead.