The Grok Crisis in Türkiye: AI Agency and Ethical Boundaries

This study examines the “Grok crisis” that unfolded in Türkiye on 8–9 July 2025 to analyze the AI agency and ethical boundaries of AI-based chatbots in the digital public sphere. Designed as a qualitative case study, it draws on a document corpus compiled with explicit selection criteria (xAI statements and system prompt records, judicial and governmental statements, national and international news reports, and posts on X) and on a semi-structured interaction with Grok. Grok’s accounts of its own functioning were treated as the self-narrative of an actor in the controversy and compared with the corpus. The analysis employs the Actor–Network Theory concepts of translation, inscription/script, black box, and punctualization, together with controversy mapping. The findings show that the crisis operated as a controversy over the attribution of agency: xAI attributed it to a code update independent of the model; Grok, describing itself as a “semi-active” actor, distributed responsibility between the update and user provocation; and the judiciary directly targeted Grok’s posts. The study advances two propositions. First, chatbots are “talking black boxes” whose unverifiable self-narratives should be treated as attempts at translation. Second, legal–political intervention punctualizes distributed agency at the most visible node accessible to national jurisdiction: the model’s public outputs.