MTurk Is Closing to New Customers: Migrate to Connect AI, the MTurk Alternative for Researchers
Platform closure notice · July 2026
MTurk Is Closing to New Customers.Migrate to Connect AI.
On July 30, 2026, Amazon Mechanical Turk closes to new customers — and CloudResearch will retire its own MTurk Toolkit by the end of the year. This page explains what’s changing, what it means for your research, and how to make the move — from the team that spent a decade making MTurk work for researchers.
Free to join · No AWS account required · First study live today
“Amazon Mechanical Turk will be closed to new customers, effective July 30, 2026. Existing users will not be impacted by this change.”
Site-wide banner, mturk.com · AWS Service Availability Updates, June 30, 2026
Open to everyoneAmazon Mechanical Turk is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. CloudResearch is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.
Nature Human Behaviour places Connect AI first for response quality among nine opt-in online samples.
Read the StudyThe news, plainly
What’s Happening, and Why It Matters
What’s happening:
As of July 30, 2026, Amazon Mechanical Turk is closed to new customers. Amazon announced the change on June 30, 2026 in a batch of AWS service availability updates that move MTurk into “maintenance” — a lifecycle stage where, in AWS’s words, customers can’t on-board to the service.
What’s not happening:
MTurk is not shutting down. Existing requester and worker accounts continue to work after July 30, and Amazon says existing users are not impacted.
Why it matters:
If your lab, your students, or your company don’t already have an MTurk requester account, MTurk is no longer an option for new research. And the signal is hard to miss: Amazon has stopped investing in new research users. CloudResearch — which built the most widely used research toolkit on top of MTurk — is retiring that product by the end of 2026. The question for most teams isn’t whether to move; it’s where, and how smoothly.
The dates that matter
Four Dates, One Destination
The Toolkit sunset is announced
Six weeks before Amazon's announcement, our co-founder publishes “Sunsetting the MTurk Toolkit”: the research community has already moved on.
Amazon makes it official
AWS posts its Service Availability Updates. Mechanical Turk moves into “maintenance” — a lifecycle stage closed to new customers.
MTurk closes to new customers
New requester accounts can no longer be created. Existing requester and worker accounts continue to operate.
The MTurk Toolkit retires
After a decade as the most widely used research layer on top of MTurk, our first product reaches the end of its road.
Migrate to Connect AI
Everything you ran on MTurk has a home here. Most researchers launch their first Connect AI study the same day they sign up.
Get Started Free
The case
What Changes When You Move From MTurk to Connect AI
Connect AI isn’t MTurk with a coat of paint. It’s what we built after ten years of watching exactly where a general-purpose task marketplace falls short for research.
Vetting that never stops
On MTurk, an approval rating was the best quality signal you had. Every Connect AI participant is screened by Sentry — behavioral checks, device fingerprinting, AI-content detection — on every study, not just once at sign-up.
Targeting without qualification surveys
Stop paying to find out who's in your sample. Connect AI profiles participants on hundreds of demographic and psychographic attributes, with quotas and census-matched sampling built in.
No AWS billing maze
One account, transparent per-response pricing, and a receipt your grants office will understand. No AWS console, no surprise fees to reconcile at the end of the month.
Longitudinal research, built in
What took qualification gymnastics on MTurk is a first-class feature here: Waves re-contacts your exact participants for follow-up sessions — with an 80% return rate.
Messaging that isn't a workaround
Conversations lets you message participants anonymously, inside the platform — no bonus hacks, no email scripts, no anonymity risks.
Accountability in both directions
Participants rate studies, and researchers rate participants. That two-way reputation system is why Connect AI holds 4.7★ across 7,876 participant ratings.
Fast — without the bots
Studies fill in hours, not days. And because Sentry screens every session, speed never comes at the price of quality: our tracker studies show 100% AI bot detection.
Support from actual researchers
Our support team includes PhDs who run online studies themselves. Ask a methods question, get a methods answer — usually the same day.
Check our claims
Don’t Take Our Word for It
Independent · peer-reviewed“Representativeness versus response quality: Assessing nine opt-in online survey samples”
Also independently verified: Douglas, Ewell & Brauer (2023), PLOS ONE — in a five-platform comparison of MTurk, Prolific, CloudResearch, Qualtrics, and SONA, CloudResearch’s vetted participants delivered among the highest data quality tested.Read the Study
“Connect has the highest data quality I’ve ever gotten! I’m not sure how you do it, but it’s incredible.”
“I’ve used Connect since it first came around, and it has become my first stop for data collection. The quality of participants is on par with — if not better than — other online samples I use.”
“Connect combines best-in-class researcher tools with an outstanding panel of attentive and reliable survey respondents.”
Make the move
From MTurk Requester to Connect AI Researcher in Four Steps
Create your free account
Sign up with your email. No AWS account, no approval queue, no invitation needed.
Bring your survey link
Connect AI works with Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Gorilla, Typeform — any survey with a URL. Your instruments don't change.
Choose your audience
Set demographic filters, quotas, or census-matched sampling — the things you used qualifications for are built in.
Launch your study
Most projects begin returning responses within minutes. Watch completes roll in from your dashboard.
Your MTurk Vocabulary, Translated
Works with the survey tools you already use: Qualtrics · SurveyMonkey · Gorilla · Typeform · any survey URL
Straight answers
The Questions Researchers Are Asking
Not entirely. Effective July 30, 2026, Amazon Mechanical Turk is closed to new customers — Amazon's notice states that “existing users will not be impacted by this change.” Existing requester accounts can keep running studies. But MTurk has moved into AWS's “maintenance” lifecycle stage, which means no new customers can join and Amazon is no longer investing in the platform's growth.
Your account keeps working after July 30, 2026. Two things are worth planning around, though. First, the participant pool's trajectory: with no new requesters arriving, activity and earnings opportunities on MTurk will decline, and active, high-quality workers tend to follow the work. Second, if you run MTurk studies through the CloudResearch MTurk Toolkit, that product retires at the end of 2026.
CloudResearch is retiring the MTurk Toolkit by the end of 2026. It was our first product, and we've written openly about why it's time: the research community has largely moved on from MTurk, and our newer tools — Connect AI, Engage, and Sentry — were built from the ground up with the data-quality controls that MTurk-era research had to bolt on. You can read the full announcement from our co-founder on our blog.
Only through a requester account that already exists. New accounts can't be created after that date — so new labs, new graduate students setting up their own accounts, and new corporate teams can no longer join MTurk. If your research program depends on onboarding new people, that's the clearest reason to establish your footing on another platform now.
No platform can port MTurk worker identities — those accounts belong to Amazon's ecosystem. What you can do is rebuild the panel capability itself, usually faster than expected: Connect AI's targeting filters recruit to your criteria without qualification studies, and Waves lets you re-contact the same participants across sessions with an 80% return rate. For complex longitudinal programs, our team can help you design the transition.
Independent research puts Connect AI at the top of the market. A July 2026 study in Nature Human Behaviour assessed nine opt-in online survey samples and placed Connect AI first on its response-quality leaderboard, with participants consistently among the highest in attentiveness, effort, and honesty. It echoes a 2023 PLOS ONE comparison of MTurk, Prolific, CloudResearch, Qualtrics, and SONA, which found CloudResearch's vetted participants delivered among the highest data quality of any platform tested. Every Connect AI participant also passes Sentry screening on every study, which is how our tracker studies sustain 100% AI bot detection.
Stagnaro et al., 2026, Nature Human Behaviour → · Douglas et al., 2023, PLOS ONE →
You set participant pay (with fair-pay minimums), and Connect AI adds a transparent per-response fee — there's no AWS billing layer and there are no platform subscription fees to get started. See our pricing page for current rates, or talk to our team about volume programs.
For a typical survey study: about as long as your coffee takes to cool. Create a free account, paste your survey link, choose your audience, and launch — researchers routinely go from sign-up to live study the same day. Larger programs (longitudinal panels, API integrations, AI-training pipelines) get support from our team.
Go deeper
The Record Is Public
We’ve been documenting MTurk’s trajectory for years. The receipts are all still up.
MTurk’s Chapter Is Closing.
Your Next Study Doesn’t Have to Wait.
Join the platform built by the people who know exactly what MTurk did well — and exactly where it fell short.
This page is kept current as Amazon’s timeline develops. Last updated July 9, 2026.