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Amazon is closing the door on new customers for Mechanical Turk, signaling what may be the final chapter for one of the internet's oldest gig platforms. For nearly two decades, Mechanical Turk connected businesses with human workers for small, repetitive tasks — the kind AI still struggled to handle reliably. That gap is narrowing fast, and Amazon appears to be stepping back rather than competing with it.
Speaking of AI, a piece circulating online this week carries the pointed title Claude Played Me for a Fool, describing a writer's experience being misled by Anthropic's chatbot. It's a low-traffic post so far, but the sentiment it captures is a familiar and growing one — that these systems can be confidently wrong in ways that feel deliberate, even when they aren't. Trust remains the central unsolved problem.
And on Capitol Hill, crypto legislation known as Clarity is still technically alive heading into Congress's summer recess, but supporters are openly acknowledging the window is shrinking. All sides say they want a deal before the midterms, but wanting and doing are two very different things in Washington, and the calendar is not being kind.
That's your Tech Beat for today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
