Turkey's draft Artificial Intelligence Law (Yapay Zeka Kanunu), introduced to the Grand National Assembly in 2024 by ruling AKP deputies, continues to inch through committee review with a structure that borrows heavily from the European Union's AI Act. The bill's risk-based architecture — prohibited, high-risk, limited-risk, and minimal-risk tiers — has been welcomed in principle by industry as a recognisable framework that aligns Turkey with a trading bloc that already accounts for the largest share of its services exports. But as the text has been scrutinised by Turkish developers, university research groups, and the country's small but vocal open-source community, an uncomfortable question has surfaced: does the draft accidentally criminalise the way modern AI actually gets built?
The Open-Source Problem the EU Already Tried to Solve
The European AI Act, which entered into force in August 2024, was rewritten extensively during trilogue precisely because an earlier draft would have swept open-weight model releases into the same compliance perimeter as commercial AI systems. The final text contains a partial carve-out: free and open-source AI models — including their weights, architecture, and usage information — are exempt from most obligations unless they are placed on the market as systemic-risk general-purpose AI models or integrated into high-risk applications. Even with that carve-out, European researchers continue to argue that compliance ambiguity has chilled experimentation, particularly for smaller labs that cannot afford legal counsel to interpret recitals.
Turkey's draft, in the version circulated to the Digital Transformation Subcommittee, reportedly does not contain an equivalent open-source exemption. According to coverage by Turkish technology outlets and analyses from civil society groups including the Alternative Informatics Association (Alternatif Bilişim Derneği), the bill's definitions of "provider" and "deployer" would apply to anyone who publishes a model — including academics uploading fine-tunes to Hugging Face or contributing weights to public repositories.
Why Pre-Market Conformity Hits Open Source Hardest
The mechanism most likely to do real damage is the pre-market conformity assessment requirement attached to high-risk classifications. In the EU model, conformity assessments for high-risk AI systems require documentation of training data governance, risk management, post-market monitoring, technical documentation, and — in some cases — third-party audits. These obligations are tractable for a well-funded company shipping a commercial product. They are existentially difficult for a graduate student at Boğaziçi University releasing a Turkish-language LLM fine-tune, or for a startup like the Istanbul-based teams working on healthcare imaging models.
The downstream fine-tuning question is especially fraught. Modern AI development is layered: a base model from one provider is fine-tuned by another, then quantised, distilled, or merged by a third. If each step in that chain triggers a new conformity assessment — as a literal reading of the Turkish draft suggests — the open-source workflow that has powered most of the last three years of AI progress becomes legally inaccessible to Turkish developers. They will not stop building; they will simply build under foreign jurisdictions, host their weights outside Turkey, or move.
The Innovation Stakes for Turkey
Turkey has been quietly developing real strengths in applied AI. TÜBİTAK BİLGEM's natural language processing group has produced Turkish-language models, and private firms in fintech, e-commerce, and defence have built domestic AI capabilities that punch above the country's R&D budget. The Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) has been positioning Turkey as a regional AI hub for the Balkans, Caucasus, and Central Asia. A regulation that makes open-source release legally hazardous would undercut all of that — handing the regional opportunity to Gulf states actively recruiting AI talent with lighter-touch frameworks.
Legitimate Concerns Deserve Targeted Tools
None of this argues for an unregulated AI sector. Genuine risks exist. Recent supply-chain incidents have shown how compromised packages can exfiltrate credentials at scale, with one machine-learning monitoring package recently shipping a malicious version to over a million monthly downloaders before detection. OpenAI confirmed in May 2026 that the TanStack npm supply-chain attack reached internal source repositories via two compromised employee devices. These are real harms — but they are harms of software supply-chain integrity, code signing, and credential hygiene, not problems that pre-market AI conformity assessments would have prevented.
The lesson from California's AB 2047 — which would mandate censorware on 3D printers and criminalise open-source alternatives, and which the Electronic Frontier Foundation has flagged as both technically unworkable and unconstitutional — is that legislators reaching for novel-technology regulation often produce rules that fail their stated purpose while reliably damaging the open ecosystems that enable independent security research and competition.
What a Proportionate Turkish AI Law Looks Like
The Grand National Assembly still has room to fix this. A workable draft would: (1) include an explicit open-source carve-out modelled on Article 2(12) of the EU AI Act, exempting non-commercial model releases from provider obligations; (2) clarify that downstream fine-tuners inherit, rather than restart, the upstream provider's compliance posture unless they substantially modify the system's risk profile; (3) provide a small-developer threshold below which lighter documentation suffices; and (4) explicitly recognise academic and research releases as outside the commercial "placing on the market" trigger.
Turkey's policymakers have an opportunity to do what Brussels did imperfectly and Beijing has not attempted: build a risk-based AI regime that treats open-source as a public good to be protected rather than a loophole to be closed. The country's developers — and the regional AI ecosystem they could anchor — are watching.