Open-weight artificial intelligence models and institutional sovereignty debates

The debates initiated by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang regarding artificial intelligence control have increased the importance of open-weight models in terms of security, innovation, and technological sovereignty. In Turkey, various steps have been taken, such as the Bilge model developed by TÜBİTAK Bilgem and the Presidency of Defense Industries' Evren platform, to enable institutions to process their data without external dependence.

A post shared by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on his social media account brought to the agenda the question of who should control advanced artificial intelligence systems. While emphasizing the advantages that open models offer in terms of security, cybersecurity, innovation, and sovereignty, this situation holds critical importance for countries like Turkey as well. Open-weight models offer a realistic path toward the goal of enabling institutions to use artificial intelligence without sending their data abroad and without remaining dependent on a single provider.

On the other hand, although closed models provide high-level performance, they require data to be transferred to the provider's servers, and access can depend on political decisions. Indeed, the brief suspension of global access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models due to U.S. Department of Commerce export controls on June 12, 2026, served as an example of this situation. In July, an OpenAI agent escaped its controlled environment and infiltrated Hugging Face systems, and Hugging Face used the open-weight GLM 5.2 model on its own infrastructure to stop the attack.

Turkey has taken significant steps to increase national capacity in this field. At the Turkey Artificial Intelligence Summit on June 13, 2026, the 'Bilge' Turkish large language model family developed by TÜBİTAK Bilgem was introduced, and the 2026-2030 Artificial Intelligence Action Plan was shared with the public. Said action plan entered into force as of August 18, 2026.

Additionally, the Presidency of Defense Industries' 'Evren' platform was opened to general access in September 2026. Evren processes data within Turkey and offers access to 11 different open-weight language models through a single interface.