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Turkey Governs AI by Circular, Not Statute

Turkey's new AI action plan sets out a presidential governance structure, hard targets and EU-style safeguards. The AI law that would give those safeguards legal force is still stuck in parliament.

Policy Desk
Grand National Assembly of Turkey, Ankara
Photo: Makril, CC BY-SA 3.0 · source

On 18 August Turkey published Presidential Circular No. 2026/9 in the Official Gazette, bringing into force a national Artificial Intelligence Action Plan for 2026–2030. Coordinated by the Ministry of Industry and Technology and signed by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it replaces the National AI Strategy that ran from 2021 to 2025. Seven weeks on, it is the most detailed statement yet of how Ankara intends to govern AI. It also highlights what the country still lacks: a law.

What the plan contains

According to a summary by the law firm CMS, the plan contains 16 actions grouped under four pillars, which the government renders in English as recognise, benefit, produce and govern. Its targets are concrete. Official and state-media accounts list AI literacy training for 5m citizens across all 81 provinces within two years; 10,000 advanced AI specialists and 100,000 application professionals by 2030; at least 2,000 public datasets; one gigawatt of AI and data-centre capacity by 2030; 20m GPU-hours for researchers, start-ups and small firms; and $10bn of mostly private investment.

Two commitments stand out for public-sector leaders. Public institutions are to dedicate at least 2% of their investment budgets to AI projects, according to Daily Sabah and TRT World. And the plan calls for a common large language model for Turkic languages alongside Turkish sectoral models, a nod to the digital-sovereignty theme running through the document. Mehmet Fatih Kacır, the industry and technology minister, framed the plan in those terms, saying that “artificial intelligence is not merely a technological field” but a determinant of economic prosperity, Daily Sabah reported.

Governance by executive design

The plan’s architecture is presidential. A National AI Board chaired by the president becomes the top decision-making body on strategy, priorities and resources. Beneath it sit a multi-stakeholder National AI Ethics Board, a programme office in the ministry’s directorate-general for national technology and AI, and, according to CMS, a public-sector AI directorate-general under the Cybersecurity Presidency. A public progress and transparency portal is meant to track each action’s targets, budget and timeline.

The safeguards borrow heavily from European practice. The law firm Moroğlu Arseven reports that the plan provides for algorithmic impact assessments of high-impact systems, publicly accessible model cards, closer alignment of Turkey’s data-protection law (KVKK) with the GDPR for AI use cases, and regulatory sandboxes in finance, healthcare, energy, mobility and telecommunications.

A circular can set targets and convene boards; only a statute can impose fines.

The missing statute

That is the gap. A presidential circular binds the administration, but it does not create new offences or penalties for private developers. Three AI bills submitted by individual deputies between June 2024 and December 2025 remain before the Grand National Assembly, according to a comparison by N Partners and a September technology-law newsletter. They differ sharply. The earliest proposes a standalone, risk-based law with fines of up to 35m lira or 7% of turnover for prohibited applications. The later two would instead amend existing internet, criminal and cybersecurity laws, focusing on deepfakes and the labelling of AI-generated content, with the telecoms regulator, BTK, as enforcer.

Parliament’s own thinking has moved further. In March a parliamentary AI research commission chaired by Fatih Dönmez completed a 900-page report recommending a new Turkish AI Authority to centralise governance, a national AI security strategy, a standing parliamentary AI committee and an assessment of joining the Council of Europe’s AI framework convention, according to the Demirören News Agency. Mr Dönmez described the approach as regulatory and balancing rather than restrictive.

What to watch

For organisations operating in Turkey, the practical consequence is a period of soft obligations: impact assessments and model cards will arrive first through public procurement and sector sandboxes rather than through courts. Exporters selling AI-enabled products into the EU face the EU’s own AI Act regardless. The tests ahead are whether the National AI Board publishes binding implementing rules, whether the transparency portal goes live with real budget data, and whether parliament chooses one of the competing legislative models, or a new AI authority, before the plan’s 2026–27 governance set-up phase, as CMS describes it, comes to an end.

Sources

  1. The Presidential Circular on the Türkiye Artificial Intelligence Action Plan was published — Moroğlu Arseven
  2. Türkiye unveils new AI Action Plan — CMS
  3. Presidential Circular on Türkiye’s Artificial Intelligence Action Plan (2026–2030) published in the Official Gazette — Erdem & Erdem
  4. Türkiye officially launches new AI plan in tech sovereignty push — Daily Sabah
  5. Türkiye launches 2026-2030 roadmap to become global AI hub — TRT World
  6. Türkiye’de 2026 Yapay Zekâ Kanunu: TBMM’ye sunulan üç kanun teklifinin detaylı karşılaştırılması — N Partners
  7. Komisyondan Türkiye Yapay Zeka Kurumu önerisi — DHA, 26 March 2026
  8. Teknoloji · Hukuk · Politika (2026/36) — Çiğdem Gizem Okkaoğlu, 6 September 2026

AI & GPP reports on how artificial intelligence and automation are changing the way governments decide, regulate and campaign. Corrections and tips: contact the editors.

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