Mechanical Turk got the eulogy. Kendra, Q Business and Bedrock Agents got the same notice, and nobody wrote it up.
On 25 August 2026, Amazon confirmed that AWS Mechanical Turk closes on 30 September 2026. The banner on the MTurk site says the decision follows an assessment, and that AWS will "close AWS Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026". Twenty-one years old, more than 500,000 workers at its peak, five weeks of notice.
The coverage has been decent. Bezos called it "artificial artificial intelligence" in 2005, humans doing work computers could not do, and there is a tidy irony in language models eating the platform that helped label their training data. A 2023 EPFL study put the share of MTurk workers using LLMs to complete text tasks at somewhere between 33% and 46%, which tells you the ending had been drafted for a while.
That is the story that ran everywhere. It is not the story that costs you money.
The facts, in order
30 June 2026. AWS publishes a page titled "AWS Service Availability Updates". It lists 27 changes across three categories.
Twenty services and features move to maintenance, closed to new customers from 30 July 2026. Existing customers keep working, and AWS says it will continue to operate and support them. The list includes Amazon Kendra, Amazon Q Business, Amazon Cognito Sync, AWS Directory Service Simple AD, AWS Mainframe Modernization self-managed experience, AWS IoT Device Defender Detect (from 31 August), Service Catalog Application Registry, Systems Manager Application Manager, Resource Groups Group Lifecycle Events, and Console myApplications. Amazon Bedrock Agents, launched November 2023, is renamed Bedrock Agents Classic. Nine SageMaker AI features go with them: A2I, Clarify, Debugger, GeoSpatial, Ground Truth, Mechanical Turk, Model Monitor, Role Manager and Studio Lab.
Five services enter sunset with end dates announced: WorkSpaces PCoIP, WorkSpaces Pool, AWS Managed Services Advanced, re:Post Private, and SageMaker Profiler.
Two reached end of support that day: Chime SDK Carrier Voice Focus, and SageMaker Ground Truth Plus.
30 July 2026. Maintenance takes effect. MTurk stops accepting new customers.
25 August 2026. MTurk gets a closure date, 36 days out.
Four weeks between maintenance and a hard date. Hold onto that number.
Our read: maintenance is a shutdown notice with the date left blank
That is an opinion, not a fact, and we will say so plainly. AWS has not said it. But the mechanics are not complicated.
A service closed to new customers has no growth. No growth means no headcount. No headcount means no features, then no integrations with whatever AWS ships next, then no new regions, then no new compliance attestations. Every one of those is a slow-motion reason to leave, and eventually AWS does the arithmetic and picks a date.
Ground Truth Plus reached end of support on 30 June 2026. Mechanical Turk went from maintenance in July to a closure date in August. That is the observed cadence on this specific list, twice.
Now apply it to Kendra. Kendra was the AWS-native answer for managed enterprise search, and the retrieval half of a large number of RAG systems built between 2023 and 2025. Q Business was what AWS put on stage as the internal knowledge assistant. Bedrock Agents, eighteen months old, now carries a suffix that means exactly what you think it means. If you chose any of those because they were the first-party option, you are running on a product with no roadmap.
MTurk got the headlines because it is old and has a good story. Kendra going quiet is the one that turns into a re-platforming project.
The asymmetry is the whole argument. If you treat maintenance as terminal and it is not, you did some planning you did not need. If you treat it as business as usual and it is not, you are migrating a production retrieval pipeline in five weeks. Those two mistakes do not cost the same.
What to check this week
Wire up the lifecycle feed. The AWS Product Lifecycle page carries an RSS feed for exactly these announcements. Point it at a Slack channel a human reads. Ten minutes, and it is the reason you get three months of warning instead of five weeks.
Start with the bill, not the logs. Export Cost Explorer grouped by service for the last three months. One file, every account in the organisation, about two minutes of work. Every expensive item on the June list turns up there: Kendra, Q Business, WorkSpaces, Directory Service, Mainframe Modernization, MTurk. Most people reach for CloudTrail first and it is the slower path to a worse answer.
Then use CloudTrail for the free ones. Billing will not show you features that are bundled or cost nothing, which covers most of the SageMaker list plus myApplications, Application Registry and Group Lifecycle Events. CloudTrail Event history is the tool for those, with two limits worth knowing: it holds the last 90 days of management events for one region at a time, and it does not show data events. That second limit matters more than it looks. A service you mostly query rather than configure can be close to invisible in management events, so absence from Event history is not evidence you are clear. If you already run an organisation trail into S3, query that in Athena instead and do it once properly.
Sort the results into swaps and rebuilds. Simple AD to Managed Microsoft AD is a swap with a known shape. Kendra to OpenSearch or Bedrock Knowledge Bases is a rebuild: re-chunking, re-embedding, relevance tuning, and re-validating output quality against whatever the business signed off on. Costing those the same is how migrations blow out.
Find the export path before you need it. For anything on the sunset list, confirm today that a data export path exists and that you have run it once. Money comes back on its own. Labelled datasets, task templates and qualification data do not, and support queues get worse as deadlines close.
Decide which lock-in you accept. S3 and Lambda are reasonable bets. A service launched eighteen months ago that has not appeared in a re:Invent keynote since is a different risk. The useful question is not how to avoid lock-in, it is which vendor decisions you can live with for five years, and which ones need an exit written down on the day you make them.
A correction, because accuracy is the point
Several outlets have reported that SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon A2I shut down on 30 September alongside MTurk.
AWS's own documentation does not say that. Ground Truth and A2I moved to maintenance and are closed to new customers. What ends on 30 September is the Mechanical Turk workforce option inside Ground Truth labelling jobs and A2I human review workflows. If MTurk is your workforce, that is a real deadline. If you use a private or vendor workforce, nothing changes for you on that date.
Check the AWS docs for anything you depend on rather than the coverage. That includes this post. Every claim above is linked at the bottom.
The part that is not architecture
There are people who did this full time. Turkopticon has organised MTurk workers since 2019 and has been consistent that for many turkers this was real income with flexible hours, done from a phone, often by people whose circumstances ruled out conventional work. They got 36 days.
The platform economics were always thin and the displacement argument writes itself. It is still worth saying out loud that a line item on a lifecycle page is somebody's household budget.
Free AWS deprecation exposure check, until 30 September 2026
No account access. No credentials. No NDA required, and no proposal attached.
Export Cost Explorer grouped by service for the last three months and send us the CSV. You can do that yourself from the Billing console in about two minutes, and it never leaves you sharing an IAM role with a company you have not hired. We cross-reference it against all 27 services and features on the 30 June list and send back:
- every affected service you are currently paying for, by account
- which of them have a published end date, and which are in maintenance with no date yet
- the alternative AWS itself recommends for each one, with the doc link
That is the deliverable, free until 30 September 2026. If you have no exposure we will tell you in one line and you owe us nothing.
What it will not tell you is how much the migration costs. Billing data shows what you pay for, not how it is wired together. Sizing a Kendra move means looking at your retrieval pipeline and the quality bar it has to clear, and that is paid discovery, because anyone who gives you an effort number without reading the code is guessing at your expense.
Sources
- CNBC, "Amazon service that Jeff Bezos called 'artificial artificial intelligence' is shutting down", 25 August 2026: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/25/amazon-service-that-jeff-bezos-called-artificial-ai-is-shutting-down.html
- AWS, "AWS Service Availability Updates", 30 June 2026: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/06/aws-service-availability/
- AWS, Product Lifecycle page and RSS feed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/service-lifecycle.html
- AWS SageMaker documentation, Mechanical Turk workforce closure notice: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/sms-workforce-management-public.html
- AWS SageMaker AI features page, maintenance and end-of-support notices: https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/ai/features/
- AWS CloudTrail documentation, Event history scope and 90-day limit: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/view-cloudtrail-events-console.html
- AWS CloudTrail documentation, management events logged by default and data events excluded: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/logging-management-events-with-cloudtrail.html
- Veselovsky, Ribeiro and West (EPFL), "Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence: Crowd Workers Widely Use Large Language Models for Text Production Tasks", 2023: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07899
