The 'Foundation of AI Training' Quietly Lowers the Curtain: Amazon Mechanical Turk Stops Accepting New Customers, Signaling the End of the Human Annotation Era
On July 5, 2026, Amazon announced it would stop accepting new customers for Mechanical Turk (MTurk), marking the end of the human-centric data annotation era. As AI shifts toward synthetic data and RLAIF, the 'invisible labor' that built modern AI is being replaced by autonomous systems, raising questions about model collapse and the future of the digital gig economy.