TBB Guide: a lawyer may not submit any legislative provision, precedent, citation or fact obtained from an AI tool to a court, arbitrator, mediator or administrative body without confirming it against official and reliable sources. Submitting hallucinated citations may be a grave breach of the duty of professional care.
Regulation Tracker · Country · Middle East
Türkiye
Substantialcivil lawupdated 2026-09-04verified 2026-09-04
As of 4 September 2026 Türkiye has no AI statute and no court rule on AI. The Union of Turkish Bar Associations' Recommendation Guide on the Use of AI for Lawyers (28 Aug 2026) is the governing instrument for the profession; KVKK's Generative AI and Data Protection Guide (24 Nov 2025) covers data; a 2024 AI bill remains in committee.
As of 2026-09-04, Türkiye has 0 binding rules, official guidance in 12 categories, 1 proposal and 1 position set only by case law across the 20 categories in the map. In 6 categories we found nothing; in 0 the position is not yet determined.
How to read this page
- Binding rule Binding rule means a rule in force from a court, statute, regulator or equivalent authority.
- Official guidance Official guidance means an official non-binding position from a judiciary, regulator, bar or public body.
- Proposed / consultation Proposed / consultation means a public bill, draft rule or consultation that is not yet in force.
- Set by case law Set by case law means no rule was found, but courts have set the position in decisions.
- Nothing found Nothing found means the category was checked and no rule, guidance, proposal or case-law position was found.
- Not yet determined Not yet determined means research did not establish a reliable position yet.
The rules, category by category
TBB Guide prohibited-use list: non-anonymised client data, case and enforcement file contents, party details, evidence, special-category data, trade secrets and negotiation strategy must not be entered into public AI tools or tools with inadequate contractual safeguards. Data masking and closed systems required.
- Recommendation Guide on the Use of Artificial Intelligence for Lawyers [Avukatlar İçin Yapay Zekâ Kullanımı Tavsiye Rehberi] 2026-08-28
- Generative AI and the Protection of Personal Data Guide, in 15 Questions (Üretken Yapay Zekâ ve Kişisel Verilerin Korunması Rehberi) 2025-11-24
- TBB Recommendation Guide on AI Use for Lawyers (official PDF)
The TBB Guide treats AI literacy as a current competence area of the profession: lawyers and trainees must not make critical use of AI without training in how it works, its limits, hallucination risk, data security, prompting, verification methods and KVKK compliance.
The TBB Guide recommends every law office adopt a written AI policy fixing approved tools, data types that may never be entered, authorisation levels, human review and verification processes, incident-reporting and breach procedures, plus office-wide staff training.
TBB Guide: where AI use touches client data, file content, legal strategy, special-category data or substantive documents produced for the client, the client must be informed clearly and in recordable form and, where needed, express consent obtained. Clients may ask that AI not be used on their file.
TBB Guide prohibited-use list: time saved by AI must not be billed as time actually spent by the lawyer, and AI learning costs or ordinary office software costs must not be passed to the client without prior notice and agreement. Using AI is not itself a ground for reducing the fee.
TBB Guide prohibited-use list protects the advocacy monopoly: lawyers must not make 'guaranteed result' or 'lawyer-free legal advice' claims, must not present AI-assisted services as replacing legal judgement, and must not facilitate non-lawyers or systems appearing to give independent legal advice through AI.
'Recommendation Guide on the Use of Artificial Intelligence for Lawyers', published by TBB on 28 Aug 2026, prepared by its Information and Technology Law Commission following the AI and Advocacy Workshop in Ankara on 14-15 Feb 2026. 44 pages, principle-based, expressly advisory and subject to periodic review. It notably bars profiling, scoring or comparing judges' decisions using their identity data, or attempting to predict a named judge's ruling in a given file.
Deployment without a governing policy. The 2025 Presidential Annual Programme committed the Ministry of Justice to expanding AI in justice services and building decision-support and recommendation systems. In Aug 2026 the Ministry's IT Directorate rolled out an OCR-plus-classification module in UYAP for criminal miscellaneous requests.
KVKK 'Generative AI and the Protection of Personal Data Guide (in 15 Questions)', Publication No. 113, published 24 Nov 2025, 64 pages, covering lawful basis, transparency, cross-border transfer, data-subject rights and security across the model lifecycle. It supplements KVKK's 2021 Recommendations on Personal Data Protection in the Field of AI.
- Generative AI and the Protection of Personal Data Guide, in 15 Questions (Üretken Yapay Zekâ ve Kişisel Verilerin Korunması Rehberi) 2025-11-24
- Report of the Parliamentary Research Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Report No. 260 2026-03-01
- KVKK announcement of the Generative AI Guide (24 Nov 2025)
- KVKK Generative AI Guide (official PDF)
- KVKK Recommendations on Personal Data Protection in the Field of AI (2021)
Recommended, not mandatory. The TBB Guide sets out a training matrix: an AI literacy, professional secrecy and data security module in trainee (staj) education; basic, intermediate and advanced in-service modules; office-wide rules training; and a TBB-coordinated trainer pool and materials standard for the bars.
The TBB Guide sets a vendor criteria table: legal data-set provenance and currency, data location and cross-border transfer basis, a contractual undertaking that prompts and documents are not used for model training, encryption, access control, MFA, logging, penetration testing, breach notification, transparency on error rates, and a written data-processor agreement.
- Recommendation Guide on the Use of Artificial Intelligence for Lawyers [Avukatlar İçin Yapay Zekâ Kullanımı Tavsiye Rehberi] 2026-08-28
- Generative AI and the Protection of Personal Data Guide, in 15 Questions (Üretken Yapay Zekâ ve Kişisel Verilerin Korunması Rehberi) 2025-11-24
- TBB Recommendation Guide on AI Use for Lawyers (official PDF)
The Artificial Intelligence Bill submitted to the Grand National Assembly on 25 Jun 2024 (first signatory Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu) remains 'in committee' before the Industry, Trade, Energy, Natural Resources, Information and Technology Committee, with the Justice Committee as secondary. The TBMM AI Research Commission's Report No. 260 (March 2026) recommends a framework AI law and a Turkish AI Authority.
Sanctions run through existing criminal-complaint and bar disciplinary powers. Kızılcahamam civil court, June 2026: fabricated Court of Cassation case numbers in a pleading triggered a court criminal complaint plus an Ankara Bar investigation of lawyer E.Ç. Istanbul, Aug 2026: a non-existent Constitutional Court decision cited in a TRY 10m promissory-note case.
- Recommendation Guide on the Use of Artificial Intelligence for Lawyers [Avukatlar İçin Yapay Zekâ Kullanımı Tavsiye Rehberi] 2026-08-28
- Hukuki Haber, investigation of lawyer over AI-fabricated case citations (18 Jun 2026)
- Cumhuriyet, non-existent Constitutional Court decision relied on in court (24 Aug 2026)
No provision of the Code of Civil Procedure, court rule or Ministry circular requires disclosure or certification of AI use in filings. The TBB Guide tells lawyers to comply where a court, arbitrator, mediator or administrative body does require a declaration, but creates no standing duty.
No rule, guidance or reported case found as of 4 September 2026. Neither the Council of Judges and Prosecutors nor the Ministry of Justice has published a circular (genelge) or ethics instrument on judges' use of AI; the Turkish Judicial Ethics Declaration does not address it.
No binding prohibition found as of 4 September 2026. Ministry of Justice statements accompanying the UYAP AI module (Aug 2026) say the system only classifies documents and recommends a filing type to staff, and is not a decision-making mechanism replacing judges or prosecutors, but this is a description not a rule.
No rule, guidance or reported case found as of 4 September 2026 for self-represented parties using AI. The TBB Guide is addressed to lawyers, trainee lawyers and law-office staff only.
No evidence rule or guidance on AI-generated or deepfake material found as of 4 September 2026. Bills penalising unlabelled AI-generated content have been tabled but none is in force.
No rule, guidance or reported case found as of 4 September 2026. The Istanbul Arbitration Centre (ISTAC) has published no AI rules or guidance note. The TBB Guide extends its verification and honesty duties to arbitrators and mediators but is not an institutional arbitration instrument.
Official documents recorded for Türkiye (4)
- Recommendation Guide on the Use of Artificial Intelligence for Lawyers [Avukatlar İçin Yapay Zekâ Kullanımı Tavsiye Rehberi]
Türkiye Barolar Birliği (TBB) · revised 2026-08-28 · verified 2026-09-04
- Report of the Parliamentary Research Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Report No. 260
TBMM AI Research Commission · revised 2026-03-01 · verified 2026-09-04
- Generative AI and the Protection of Personal Data Guide, in 15 Questions (Üretken Yapay Zekâ ve Kişisel Verilerin Korunması Rehberi)
KVKK · revised 2025-11-24 · verified 2026-09-04
- Artificial Intelligence Bill [Yapay Zekâ Kanunu Teklifi]
TBMM · revised 2024-06-25 · verified 2026-09-04
Court incidents on the record in Türkiye
- Yichang District Court (Hubei)2026-07-21 Warning
Cite this page
SafeLegalAI Legal AI Regulation Tracker, "Türkiye" (updated 2026-09-04, verified 2026-09-04), https://safelegalai.com/regulation/country/tr (accessed 2026-09-04). Data: CC BY 4.0.
SafeLegalAI is a research publication by Cognesio LLP, not a law firm. Nothing here is legal advice, and no lawyer–client relationship arises from reading it. Rules change; always check the official document linked on each record and take advice on your own situation. Researched and drafted with AI assistance; verified against primary sources and edited by Cognesio LLP. The linked official documents are the record — our summaries are not the law and are not legal advice.
- TBB, Recommendation Guide on the Use of AI for Lawyers (official PDF, 28 Aug 2026)
- TBB announcement of the Guide
- KVKK, Generative AI and Personal Data Protection Guide (24 Nov 2025)
- TBMM, Artificial Intelligence Bill record (25 Jun 2024, in committee)
- Ministry of Justice press release, AI-supported new era in the judiciary (12 May 2026)
- Hukuki Haber, Turkish lawyer investigated over AI-fabricated citations (18 Jun 2026)