Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing service launched in 2005, is closing to new customers on July 30, 2026, and will no longer receive new features, signaling a potential end to the platform. The service was initially used for simple tasks like completing CAPTCHA challenges, but later became a key player in annotating data for AI models. However, the relationship between Mechanical Turk and AI models has become complicated, with many workers using large language models to complete tasks, raising questions about the reliability of the data. Why it matters: the decline of Mechanical Turk highlights the evolving role of human labor in the development of AI systems, as automation and machine learning continue to advance.