Turan Research Center

When the heads of state of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) convene on May 15 in Turkistan under the theme "Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development," the central deliverable will be exactly what the title suggests: a coordinated push to build out Turkic cooperation around AI. The venue fits. Turkistan is the designated spiritual capital of the Turkic world, anchored by the mausoleum of Khoja Ahmed Yasavi, the twelfth-century Sufi mystic whose influence is treated as a unifying thread running across the Turkic Muslim space from Anatolia to the Tien Shan. The political subtext sits beneath the symbolism. Turkic cooperation has reached unprecedented levels in recent years, and the OTS is increasingly being driven by three post-Soviet Turkic states — Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and, more cautiously, Uzbekistan — whose strategic orientations diverge from Ankara's. Turkistan will not resolve those tensions. It will instead showcase what the OTS can deliver when its drivers' interests align, and AI is the file where they align most cleanly.

The Center of Gravity Has Moved

The OTS was a Turkish-led project at its founding in 2009, but the initiative has migrated east. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev first proposed the structure in 2006, and the political energy now sits with the three Caspian-facing states. The shift has accelerated since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which bogged Moscow down in a war of attrition and opened space for its southern neighbors to maneuver. The Turkic states have used that space to deepen their own cooperation and to widen their options — toward the United States, the European Union, and one another.

Azerbaijan is the architect of the current phase. President Ilham Aliyev's government convened the first informal OTS summit in Shusha in July 2024, hosted the September 2024 Commission on the Common Turkic Alphabet that finalized a 34-letter Latin script, and chaired the 12th regular summit in Gabala in October 2025 under the theme "Regional Peace and Security." At Gabala, Aliyev declared that "it is very important for the Turkic States to act as a single power center" and framed military cooperation as essential to that vision. He has backed the framing with action — trilateral summits with Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, an offer to quadruple Kazakh oil exports through Azerbaijani infrastructure at Russia's expense, and Azerbaijani participation in the multilateral Unity 2025 exercises in Samarkand alongside Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

Baku has also leaned into the historical narrative. The centenary of the First Turkological Congress, held in Baku in 1926, falls in 2026, and Azerbaijan is positioning the anniversary as the intellectual prehistory of OTS integration. The framing has substance behind it: Azerbaijan was the first post-Soviet Turkic state to complete the Latin script transition, and Baku is treating that experience as a template the rest of the region is now following. Combined with the Middle Corridor file — where Azerbaijan is the indispensable transit node — Baku has effectively claimed both the symbolic and the operational center of the project.

Azerbaijan has paired the political role with a serious AI build-out. Aliyev approved an Artificial Intelligence Strategy for 2025–2028 structured around five pillars — regulation, talent, data infrastructure, research, and international cooperation — and the country has climbed to 70th place in international AI readiness rankings, the leading position in the South Caucasus. The AI Academy launched in Baku in September 2025 is targeting 3,000 specialists and 500 government employees for fully funded training. A prototype Azerbaijani large language model trained on roughly 10 billion tokens was presented in 2025. The country's standardization body, the TK-05 committee, has adopted eight international AI standards as national standards, and pilot deployments are running in document processing, legal services, smart-grid optimization in the energy sector, healthcare, and agriculture. The strategy explicitly frames Azerbaijan's role as a regional AI leader, and the proposal floated by Baku for a common Turkic AI institute follows directly from that posture.

Kazakhstan's Moment

Hosting in Turkistan is the public marker of Kazakhstan's claim to co-leadership. Tokayev's administration has moved aggressively on three fronts that will be on display this week.

On AI, Kazakhstan now has the most developed sovereign stack in the region. The Alem.ai International Center, announced by Tokayev in 2024 and now operational in Astana, anchors a broader ecosystem that includes the Alem.cloud and AlFarabium-2 supercomputers (roughly 3.6 exaflops combined, with up to two exaflops of FP8 performance on advanced GPUs), the sovereign KazLLM and Alem LLM models, and the Institute of Smart Systems and Artificial Intelligence at Nazarbayev University, which developed KazLLM and provides the country's independent research anchor. The institutional layer is equally dense: a dedicated Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development established in 2025, a Concept for AI Development for 2024–2029, and the first comprehensive AI law in Central Asia (Law No. 230-VIII, signed November 17, 2025 and in force since January 18, 2026). The law is risk-based, classifying systems as minimal, medium, or high risk and increasing regulatory obligations with potential harm. It bans manipulative AI, constrains social scoring and emotion recognition, requires labeling of AI-generated content with both user-visible warnings and machine-readable markers, and clarifies that fully AI-generated works do not qualify for copyright protection while preserving protection where meaningful human creative input is present. The Samruk-Kazyna sovereign wealth fund has installed an AI system, SKAI, with voting rights on its board — a governance experiment without precedent in the region. The country's headline human-capital target is one million people trained in AI-related skills by 2030. Tokayev is expected to pitch this ecosystem as the natural backbone of any pan-Turkic AI institute that emerges from Turkistan.

On strategic alignment, Kazakhstan formally announced its accession to the Abraham Accords in late 2025, becoming the first post-Soviet state and the first Central Asian country to join. Astana has recognized Israel since 1992 and some labeled the move as merely symbolic, but it was a deliberate signal of orientation. It was paired with a critical minerals deal with the United States and, in the months that followed, an Israeli presidential visit that included a stop at Alem.ai.

On security, Kazakhstan remains in the Collective Security Treaty Organization with Russia, but Astana is widening its options. Kazakh military cooperation with Turkey and Azerbaijan has expanded steadily, and Kazakh personnel are again participating in Exercise Regional Cooperation 2026, the thirtieth iteration of CENTCOM's annual exercise with Central and South Asian partners, hosted in the United States in June. The exercise draws from nearly a dozen countries and provides a quiet but consistent channel of US-Central Asian military familiarity that sits parallel to anything the OTS itself can offer. As Carnegie analyst Temur Umarov has observed, "only Washington can serve as a sufficient counterweight to both Moscow and Beijing" — and Astana, like Baku, is acting on that logic.

Uzbekistan's Slower Climb

Mirziyoyev has used the post-Karimov decade to remake Uzbekistan's regional role. Tashkent under Islam Karimov had withdrawn from Turkic cooperation, fearing that pan-Turkic sentiment might undermine his domestic authority; Mirziyoyev reversed course, helping facilitate regional intergration by normalizing long-standing border disputes with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and mediated successfully where Russia had previously been the only credible broker. The result is a Uzbekistan that now operates as a regional player rather than a regional spoiler. At Gabala, Mirziyoyev proposed regular joint meetings of OTS foreign ministers and intelligence chiefs and called for a development strategy through 2030 anchored in AI and the digital economy. During the height of last year's Russia-Azerbaijan rift, he told Aliyev that "never in history have our relations been at such a high level as today" — a public marker of Tashkent's choice.

Tashkent is not yet at the level of Baku or Astana in driving the OTS agenda, and its AI ecosystem remains early-stage. Its position as the most populous OTS member gives it weight that Mirziyoyev's diplomacy is steadily converting into influence.

The Turkey Question

Turkey is the largest and most militarily capable OTS member, and Ankara's defense industry remains the natural partner for any deeper Turkic military integration. But the three drivers diverge from Turkey on three issues that have hardened over the past two years.

The first is Northern Cyprus. Ankara secured observer status for the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 2022, but Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan reaffirmed UN Security Council Resolutions 541 and 550 — which declare the TRNC's secession legally invalid — in the joint EU-Central Asia declaration in Samarkand in April 2025. Turkish nationalist politicians publicly accused the three of betraying Turkic solidarity. The Gabala declaration papered over the rift, but the underlying calculation in Astana, Tashkent, and Ashgabat has not changed: relations with the European Union and the principle of territorial integrity outweigh any obligation to recognize the TRNC.

The second is Israel. Azerbaijan's long-standing security, economic, and intelligence partnerships with Israel are structural and broad, not transactional, and Baku has only increased relations with Jerusalem in recent years, despite Turkish pressure. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan's Abraham Accords accession has affirmed Astana’s strategic orientation toward a moderate coalition of Middle Eastern powers also including the UAE, that Turkey increasingly views as adversarial. Ankara has used OTS summits in the past to criticize Israel, and any move in that direction at Turkistan would create discomfort precisely as Turkic governments are moving closer to Jerusalem.

The third is the broader strategic compass. For Ankara, the post-Soviet Turkic space sits beside — not above — its priorities in the eastern Mediterranean, the Arab world, and an increasingly autonomous foreign policy that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's coalition partner Devlet Bahceli has openly framed as a Turkey-China-Russia alignment. For Baku, Astana, and Tashkent, the strategic compass points increasingly toward the United States, the EU, and the Middle Corridor — and away from Russia and Iran (although not China).

AI as the Flagship File

AI is where the drivers' interests converge most cleanly, which is why it is the theme of the summit. Two ideas are likely to dominate the conversation in Turkistan, and both follow logically from the ecosystems Baku and Astana have built.

The first is a common Turkic AI institute, originally floated by Baku, that would coordinate research, education, and compute infrastructure across member states. The institutional case is straightforward. Kazakhstan brings compute capacity at scale, a regulatory framework that is now in force, a research anchor at ISSAI, an applied-research front door at Alem.ai, and a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence with explicit authority to coordinate. Azerbaijan brings a national strategy organized around the same five domains that any cross-border institute would need to cover, an AI Academy that is already operational and could serve as a regional training hub, a national standards body that has begun aligning with international norms, and the political initiative for the institute itself. Turkey brings scale and a private-sector technology base; at Gabala, Erdogan called for accelerated development of a Turkish large language model "to catch up with global developments in artificial intelligence and to preserve our cultural richness." Uzbekistan, which has placed AI at the center of its proposed 2030 development strategy, would benefit disproportionately from compute access and shared training resources.

The second is the link between the common alphabet and shared linguistic data for sovereign AI. Sovereign Turkic language models — KazLLM and Alem LLM in Kazakhstan, the 10-billion-token Azerbaijani prototype presented in 2025, and the Turkish LLM Erdogan called for at Gabala — currently train on national corpora in different scripts and orthographies, which limits the value of pooling data across borders. Convergence on the 34-letter Latin alphabet finalized in Baku in September 2024 would, over time, make shared training data, shared evaluation benchmarks, and shared safety standards possible. The first book printed in the common alphabet was presented to leaders at Gabala. Turkistan is the logical next step, where alphabet, language data, computing, and regulation can be framed as parts of a single integration agenda.

Concrete deliverables to watch for: a framework decision on a common AI institute, including its location and governance; a coordinated approach to compute access for smaller OTS members; movement toward common standards for AI-generated content labeling, building on the Azerbaijani standards work and Kazakhstan's labeling regime; and language on data governance that aligns at least partially with Kazakhstan's new AI law. None of these is transformative on its own. Taken together, they would mark the OTS's most substantive move yet into a flagship technical domain, and would give the organization something more durable than declarations to point to.

The Military File

The Gabala summit left two questions open. AI is the easier one. The harder one is military cooperation. Aliyev's invitation at Gabala for member states to hold the first joint OTS military exercise in Azerbaijan in 2026 has not yet materialized into a fixed date, format, or participation list, although Turkic forces have already trained together in non-OTS formats — most recently in the Unity 2025 exercises in Samarkand. The July 2025 meeting of Turkic defense industry heads in Istanbul produced an understanding that Azerbaijan would host a second iteration in 2026, and the Gabala declaration referenced a draft "Treaty on Strategic Partnership, Eternal Friendship and Brotherhood of Turkic States." But CSTO membership for Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan's constitutional neutrality, and the parallel pull of CENTCOM exercises mean that any OTS military framework will remain considerably less than a mutual defense pact. Turkistan is more likely to produce procedural decisions than a breakthrough.

Conclusion

The strategic divergences inside the OTS — over Cyprus, Israel, and the alignment of the Turkic world with the West — are real, and the summit will leave them where it found them. That is the point. What Turkistan can do is show that the OTS is now capable of substantive cooperation in the areas where its drivers agree. AI is that area, and the drivers setting the pace are Baku and Astana.

Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, a Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an Expert at the N7 Foundation, and a Research Fellow at Bar Ilan University's Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.