Amazon Web Services will stop registering new customers for its more than 20-year-old crowdsourcing service Mechanical Turk.

Launched in 2005, a year ahead of AWS, Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing marketplace where users post tasks that are difficult to automate, such as CAPTCHA verification or sentiment analysis, and others bid to complete them.

According to SiliconANGLE, Mechanical Turk was highly popular in its early days. It was also mentioned in the Cambridge Analytica scandal involving a Facebook personal data leak. It later shifted into a tool for AI training data work. From 2018, Amazon assigned people to label and review data for neural network training on AWS SageMaker.

But Amazon appears to have decided Mechanical Turk is no longer needed. The service is currently in a "maintenance" state. That suggests it is likely to be fully shut down soon.

Amazon said on its website it will stop new customer registrations from July 30, 2026. It said existing users would not be affected by the change.

TechCrunch reported Mechanical Turk has effectively reached the end of its life and is likely to be fully shut down before long.

Amazon has not officially declared the service will be shut down. It is already offering SageMaker Ground Truth as an alternative service for collecting machine learning data. The AWS cloud also supports integration with third-party crowdsourcing platforms.