AI Matters
Why it matters
Amazon is shutting down its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform
The Decoder Amazon sunsets Mechanical Turk, the original "Artificial Artificial Intelligence"
Amazon Web Services announced it will stop accepting new customers for its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service starting July 30, 2026.
Why it matters
The closure of the original micro-task platform marks the end of an era for human-labeled data as AI models increasingly train on synthetic data.
Latest brief · Jul 22, 2026