About
YETİ is a research and application center examining the legal and ethical limits of artificial intelligence in the Turkish and European legal context.
Founding
The center was established to work in the areas the law has not yet reached and ethics has not yet named. Its purpose is not to describe the legal consequences of AI systems, but to identify the points at which those consequences do not fit existing legal categories.
When a machine decides, responsibility does not disappear — it disperses. Where the parties who trained the model, supplied the data, set the threshold, and applied the output are different, each can plausibly disclaim their share. The center's work is to record that dispersal and track where it goes.
Method
The center keeps three records permanently open: an index of published work, a registry of its own errors, and a list of the questions it cannot answer. All three follow from one principle — the limits of institutional knowledge are as public as the knowledge itself.
Legal content is reviewed before publication by a scholar working in Turkish law. No case number, court decision, or legislative reference is published whose source cannot be verified.
Governance
The center is governed by a director, two deputy directors, and a board. The research agenda is set by the board; no funding source holds any say over it.
Funding
Every source of the center's income, its amount, and the conditions attached to it are published here. Naming a source while concealing its conditions discloses nothing.
Bahçeşehir University — institutional allocation
TRY 2,400,000
—
Core operation of the center: personnel, premises, publication and event costs.
No conditions attached. The research agenda is set by the center; the university does not require pre-publication review.
Public research fund — project-based grant
TRY 850,000
—
Fieldwork and translation costs for the comparative alignment framework line.
Periodic progress reports are required. The grant confers no direction over the content of findings and no right of publication approval.
International research collaboration — co-funding
—
A joint doctoral fellowship and mobility support for comparative legal work.
The agreement is under negotiation. Should the signed text lack a clause securing freedom of publication, the collaboration will not be accepted; this condition was stated by the center in advance.