Amazon kills Mechanical Turk — was it just an early version of RLHF?
amazon is shutting down mechanical turk for new users in 2026, effectively ending the era of its 'artificial artificial intelligence' crowdsourcing platform.
amazon web services announced that mechanical turk will stop accepting new customers on july 30, 2026, placing the decades-old crowdsourcing service into maintenance mode without further updates. launched in 2005 as 'artificial artificial intelligence,' the platform became obsolete as ai labs shifted to specialized vendors like scale ai to handle high-quality training data and difficult edge cases. a 2023 study revealed that crowdworkers were already using llms to complete tasks, undermining the platform's utility for generating reliable human data. existing customers can continue using the service, but the move signals the end of general-purpose micro-tasking as a viable ai infrastructure layer.