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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how Turkey's sovereign AI initiatives, including national LLM development, may reproduce the epistemological and material power configurations they claim to resist, while also generating frictions that open space for alternative futures.

Paper long abstract

As states increasingly position artificial intelligence as a matter of national strategic priority, "sovereign AI" has emerged as a compelling discourse promising technological self-determination and autonomy from dominant corporate and geopolitical actors. Drawing on ethnographic research and policy analysis in Turkey, this paper critically examines how national AI governance frameworks—ostensibly designed to assert sovereignty—may paradoxically reproduce the very epistemological and material configurations of power they claim to resist.

Through analysis of policy documents, institutional deliberations, and fieldwork focusing on TÜBİTAK's Turkish large language model development project, this study traces how sovereign AI initiatives navigate tensions between aspirations for autonomy and the structural dependencies embedded in global AI supply chains, training data regimes, and computational infrastructures. The paper argues that sovereign AI frameworks often adopt the instrumental rationality and techno-solutionist logics of hegemonic AI development, even as they rhetorically contest Western technological dominance—creating institutional spaces where state-led AI expansion can enable new forms of surveillance and epistemic closure under the banner of national interest.

Yet the paper also attends to generative frictions within these processes—moments where local actors contest or redirect sovereign AI agendas toward more pluralistic ends. By situating Turkey's AI governance trajectory within broader patterns of technological nationalism in the global South, this contribution illuminates how sovereignty claims simultaneously challenge and reinscribe algorithmic power.