Amazon will permanently close Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) — the crowdsourcing marketplace and MTurk API for Human Intelligence Tasks — on 30 September 2026, and the same closure ends SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) human-review workflows

What this means for you

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is the on-demand human workforce behind a huge amount of data labeling, survey collection, content moderation, and evaluation work: requesters post Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) and workers complete them, driven programmatically through the MTurk API (the `mturk` boto3 client and the `mturk-requester` endpoint). Following an assessment, AWS has decided to close it permanently on 30 September 2026. New customer registration already stopped on 30 July 2026. On the closure date HIT submission ends and all remaining unsubmitted HITs automatically expire, so any pipeline — nightly data-labeling jobs, RLHF/eval loops, academic studies, moderation queues — that calls the MTurk API for human work stops returning results that day. The blast radius is wider than the marketplace: the closure also ends the Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker type in SageMaker Ground Truth labeling jobs and Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) human-review workflows as of 30 September 2026, so ML teams who never touched the MTurk console directly are affected too. Money and records wind down on their own clock: requesters can award bonuses and approve or reject completed HITs until 30 October 2026 (unactioned HITs auto-approve), pre-paid balances are refunded within 30 days, and transaction history stays available only until 28 January 2027 — pull anything you need for the record before then.

Where to go

There is no in-place successor from AWS — MTurk, SageMaker Ground Truth, and Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) are all closing together, so this is a move off the platform, not an upgrade. First, protect what is owed: workers should verify a payment method and transfer schedule in the MTurk Worker Portal, and requesters should verify payment info in the Requester Portal so refunds process cleanly. Export any HIT data, results, and transaction history you need before 28 January 2027, after which the history is gone. Then re-home the human-in-the-loop work: move data labeling and annotation to another managed crowdsourcing/labeling provider (see alternatives), and if you drive MTurk through the API, plan to rewrite the `mturk` boto3 / MTurk API calls against the new vendor's API — there is no drop-in endpoint. Validate the replacement pipeline on real tasks well before 30 September 2026 rather than treating the cutoff as a switch you flip at the last minute.

• Managed data-labeling / annotation platforms (e.g. Scale AI, Labelbox, Appen, Toloka, Prolific for research studies) — evaluate against your task types, quality controls, and API
• Other human-in-the-loop / crowdsourcing marketplaces (e.g. Clickworker, Remotasks) for HIT-style microtasks
• Self-hosted labeling tooling (e.g. Label Studio, CVAT) paired with your own contractor or internal workforce for full control