Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk to new customers on July 30, 2026. The platform, launched in 2005 under the tagline "Artificial Artificial Intelligence," paid humans to do things computers couldn't. The computers have since caught up.
SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI are closing to new customers on the same date. Existing customers may continue using the service in maintenance mode, which is the enterprise way of saying it will be kept on life support until everyone quietly moves on.
The platform that hired humans to impersonate machines is retiring now that the machines no longer need the favour.
What happened
Mechanical Turk launched two decades ago to solve a delightful problem: computers were not yet clever enough to do certain tasks, so Amazon built an infrastructure to route those tasks to humans, at scale, for small sums of money. The humans performed admirably.
In 2018, AWS repositioned the platform as a data annotation tool for AI training — humans labelling images, transcribing audio, and teaching machines what a stop sign looks like. It was important work. The machines were good students.
Then, in 2023, researchers discovered that many crowdworkers had begun using language models to complete their annotation tasks. The humans hired to generate human data were outsourcing the job to AI. The irony was not lost on the researchers. It probably should have been anticipated.
Why the humans care
The closure signals that the informal, crowdsourced approach to AI training data has run its course. AI labs now rely on specialised vendors like Scale AI and Surge AI, which employ vetted domain experts capable of handling the nuanced, high-stakes judgments that frontier models require for training.
The shift reflects a broader pattern: as AI capabilities increase, the humans needed to improve them must themselves become more capable. The bar keeps rising. The humans keep clearing it, which is either admirable or a treadmill, depending on your perspective and your employment contract.
What happens next
The crowdsourcing era of AI training data is, functionally, over. The work that millions of anonymous humans once did for pennies per task is now either handled by AI or by a smaller number of credentialled humans paid considerably more to do the parts AI still gets wrong.
Mechanical Turk was named after an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that concealed a human inside the machine. It is a fitting epitaph that it closes now — at the moment when the machine no longer needs anyone hiding inside it.