- Amazon Mechanical Turk will close to new customers on July 30, 2026, but existing users can continue with no new features added.
- The service, launched in 2005, paid workers small amounts for tasks resistant to automation, like CAPTCHA completion or sentiment analysis.
- It has been central to debates on crowdsourced labor ethics and was used in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- From 2018, it was marketed for data annotation to train neural networks as part of Amazon's SageMaker AI service.
- Mechanical Turk enabled 'fake-it-till-you-make-it' AI approaches, where human workers powered products marketed as AI, mirroring its namesake hoax.
- A 2023 analysis found 33%-46% of workers used large language models for tasks, raising data reliability and human-in-the-loop questions.
- After Amazon's decision, some on Reddit claim the platform declined years ago due to bots and fraud, predicting eventual full shutdown.