Amazon Mechanical Turk Blocks New Customers July 30, 2026

Mechanical Turk's site posted the closure notice for new accounts after internal review at AWS. Existing requesters retain full access while the service receives only security and uptime maintenance. No new features or expansions are scheduled. The decision follows years of documented platform degradation from automated scripts and low-quality submissions.

A 2023 study measured 33 to 46 percent of MTurk tasks completed by large language models rather than human workers, directly degrading label reliability for downstream model training. Concurrent researcher reports logged rising bot prevalence and payout fraud that reduced effective hourly earnings below minimum wage thresholds in multiple regions. These metrics align with the shift of data annotation workloads to specialized platforms such as Appen and Scale AI.

Worker income loss concentrates among long-term Turkers who supplied the majority of high-volume labeling batches for SageMaker pipelines. Operational continuity for remaining customers will require migration to alternative marketplaces within 12 months or acceptance of progressively noisier data. AWS has not published active user counts or revenue figures that would allow precise forecasting of full decommission timing.

Full service retirement becomes probable once monthly active requesters fall below 500, a threshold likely reached by late 2027 given current trends.