Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the digital sweatshop that paid humans pennies to prove they weren’t robots, is closing its doors to new customers. On July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will stop accepting new customers, according to an announcement on the Mechanical Turk website. Amazon Web Services says the decision came after “careful consideration,” adding that existing customers can keep using it as normal. AWS will continue investing in security and availability but has no plans for new features. In other words, the lights are on, but nobody’s home.

Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk was a marketplace where people performed tiny, automatable tasks for pocket change - like filling out CAPTCHAs or deciding if a sentence was happy or sad. It sparked debates about labor ethics and even played a bit part in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. Starting in 2018, Amazon also pitched it as a way to annotate data for AI training via SageMaker.

Less overtly, Mechanical Turk was the hidden engine for companies faking AI, with humans doing the work behind the curtain - a fitting callback to the original 18th-century hoax where a chess-playing machine hid a human. But irony piled on irony: a 2023 analysis found 33% to 46% of Turk workers were using large language models to complete their tasks, raising questions about data reliability and whether humans were needed at all. One Reddit user declared the platform died “years ago,” predicting Amazon will eventually pull the plug entirely.