Amazon will stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk from July 30, marking another step towards winding down one of the internet's oldest crowdsourcing platforms.

While existing customers can continue using the service, Amazon Web Services says it has no plans to introduce new features, signalling that the platform is entering its final phase.

A platform that helped shape AI

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk allowed businesses to outsource simple tasks that computers struggled to complete, such as labelling images, moderating content and annotating data.

As artificial intelligence evolved, the platform became widely used to generate training data for machine learning models, making it an important part of the AI development ecosystem.

Growing challenges

In recent years, Mechanical Turk has faced declining usage as researchers and workers moved to alternative platforms amid concerns over bots, fraud and low-quality data.

Studies also found that many workers were using large language models to complete tasks, raising questions about the reliability of human-generated training data.

An uncertain future

Although Amazon says the platform will remain available for existing users, the decision to stop onboarding new customers suggests Mechanical Turk's role in the AI industry is coming to an end after more than two decades.