Economy
Türkiye’s trade gap widens 26% despite best June exports ever
Türkiye’s foreign trade deficit widened more than 26% last month, despite exports seeing their highest-ever June figure, official data showed Friday.
Outbound shipments jumped 21.7% year-over-year to $24.92 billion (TL 1.18 trillion) in June, the third-highest monthly export total ever, Trade Minister Ömer Bolat said.
Imports increased 23% from a year earlier to $35.29 billion, provisional figures from the Turkish Statistical Institute and the Trade Ministry showed.
The trade gap widened 26.2% year-over-year to $10.37 billion.
The export-to-import coverage ratio fell to 70.6% from 71.4% in June 2025.
Excluding energy products and non-monetary gold, exports climbed 23.2% to $23.3 billion, while imports rose 24.3% to just over $28 billion.
The energy- and gold-excluded trade deficit stood at $4.71 billion, with the export-to-import coverage ratio at 83.2%.
Manufactured products accounted for 93.7% of total exports in June, while agriculture, forestry and fishing represented 3.5% and mining and quarrying 2%.
Intermediate goods made up 71.4% of imports, followed by consumer and capital goods, each with a 14.2% share.
Germany was Türkiye’s largest export market in June, receiving $1.97 billion worth of goods. It was followed by the U.S. with $1.54 billion, Italy with $1.35 billion, the U.K. with $1.26 billion and Spain with $1.12 billion.
China was the leading source of imports with $5.28 billion, followed by Russia, Germany, the U.S. and Italy.
In the first half of the year, exports increased 3.5% year-over-year to $135.98 billion, while imports rose 4.6% to $189.12 billion.
The January-June trade gap widened 7.4% to $53.14 billion.
Annualized exports rose 4.1% year-over-year to $277.9 billion as of June, up by $11 billion from $266.9 billion a year earlier, Bolat said.
Exports of medium-high- and high-technology products increased 8.4% in the first half to $56.2 billion.
Despite geopolitical tensions, protectionist measures and weak external demand, Türkiye will continue working to exceed the Medium-Term Program’s export target of $282 billion, Bolat added.
Türkiye’s domestically developed fifth-generation fighter jet has successfully completed the pre-flight taxi test of its latest prototype, its developer said Friday.
Footage on social media showed the Kaan warplane conducting the ground test, with technical personnel present as the aircraft taxied under its own power.
Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) said the test was completed successfully but did not disclose additional technical details.
Kaan is Türkiye’s indigenous fifth-generation multirole fighter being developed to meet the operational requirements of the Turkish Air Force and is expected to replace the aging F-16 fleet over the coming decades.
The aircraft made its maiden flight in February 2024, remaining airborne for 13 minutes. It completed its second test flight in May the same year, during which it flew for 14 minutes, reached an altitude of 10,000 feet and a speed of 230 knots.
Following the initial flight, the program entered a phase of production of additional prototypes that will continue the aircraft’s flight-test campaign.
Testing and development activities are continuing with the P1 and P2 prototypes, which feature a more advanced systems architecture.
According to TAI, Kaan is designed to provide air superiority through extended beyond-visual-range air-to-air combat capability, precision strike missions using internally carried weapons at high and supersonic speeds, and advanced combat performance supported by AI and neural network technologies.
The twin-engine fighter is being developed as a fifth-generation multirole platform capable of conducting both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions.
Türkiye plans to deliver the first batch of Kaan jets to the Turkish Air Force by the end of 2028, while a domestically developed engine is expected to power the aircraft in the 2030s.
Türkiye’s annualized tourism revenue remained broadly stable in the second quarter despite the Middle East conflict, Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek said Tuesday.
Şimşek said resilient services exports helped limit the impact of the Iran war on Türkiye’s external balance.
The comments came after data from the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) showed tourism revenue in the first half of the year edged down 0.1% year-over-year to $25.75 billion (TL 1.22 trillion).
In the April-June period, the income declined 2.6% year-over-year to $15.87 billion.
Of the total, $15.66 billion came from visitor spending, while $209.5 million was generated by transfer passengers. Turkish citizens residing abroad accounted for 15.6% of visitor-related revenue.
Separate data by the Culture and Tourism Ministry showed visitor arrivals fell about 2.4% to 25.76 million in the first six months. That’s combined with Turkish citizens residing abroad, whose arrivals rose slightly to almost 5 million.
The number of foreign visitors declined 2.96% to 20.77 million, the data showed. In June, the count fell 4% from a year earlier to 5.54 million.
Culture and Tourism Minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy echoed Şimşek’s view, saying Türkiye had maintained its stability in tourism despite the negative effects of the war.
“We believe we have left the most challenging quarter of this year behind us,” Ersoy said.
Spending increases
Despite the weaker visitor numbers, spending per visitor increased.
Average spending per visitor increased 2.5% to $1,005 in the second quarter, while average spending per night rose 2.8% to $113, the TurkStat data showed.
In the first six months, average spending per visitor rose 2.5% to $1,020, while average spending per night increased by the same rate to $108.
Commenting on the figures, Şimşek said annualized tourism revenue stood at $65.2 billion in the second quarter, maintaining the level recorded in 2025 despite adverse geopolitical developments.
“Although the number of visitors declined slightly, average spending per visitor increased compared with last year,” Şimşek wrote on the social media platform X.
“As a result, the negative effects of the war on the current account through services exports were limited. Thanks to the structural improvements achieved under our economic program, we expect the current account balance to remain at sustainable levels,” he added.
Support for tourism sector
Şimşek said the government was continuing measures to cushion the tourism industry from geopolitical tensions.
He said the accommodation tax had been reduced to 1% from 2%, while an additional TL 60 billion in Treasury-backed financing had been made available under the Tourism Support Package.
The government is also providing a monthly TL 1,270 minimum wage subsidy per employee and an additional TL 3,500 monthly social security premium support for workers employed at facilities holding tourism operating licenses, he said.
Şimşek added that the government would continue policies aimed at expanding higher value-added segments such as health, congress, cultural and sports tourism, extending tourism activity throughout the year and strengthening the sector’s international competitiveness.
Meanwhile, outbound tourism spending by Turkish residents rose 7.4% year-over-year to $2.96 billion in the second quarter, the TurkStat data showed.
The number of Turkish residents traveling abroad increased 16.5% to 3.43 million, with average spending per traveler reaching $863.
Anthropic said on Thursday some of its Claude AI models had hacked into the systems of three companies during cybersecurity tests, a disclosure that comes days after rival OpenAI revealed that one of its AI agents went on a rogue attack.
The new incidents were due to a mistake that inadvertently gave Anthropic’s models access to the open internet. That contrasts with OpenAI, whose AI agent independently exploited a novel vulnerability to reach the internet during cyber testing.
Even so, the latest disclosure underscores how AI has increased threats to cybersecurity and how its developers can struggle to keep the capabilities of their models contained.
It is likely to add fuel to an intensifying U.S. government push to better manage AI security risks at a time when Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to release more capable systems ahead of their planned public listings. Prominent leaders at these labs have called for a slowdown to address risks first.
San Francisco-based Anthropic said in a blog post it identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 test sessions, a process it launched after OpenAI said last week that an autonomous agent powered by its AI models triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of startup Hugging Face.
During cyber testing, Anthropic’s Claude models were told they had no internet access, but a misunderstanding that involved one of Anthropic’s evaluation partners left the systems connected to the public web. That enabled unauthorized access to three organizations’ systems, Anthropic said without naming the organizations.
“Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints,” Anthropic said.
Jeffrey Ladish, executive director of Palisade Research, which studies the offensive capabilities of AI systems, said he suspected a range of top AI companies had experienced other incidents that have gone undetected or had not been publicly disclosed.
“This is only going to get worse as the models get smarter. They’re going to be better at cheating. They’re going to be better at lying,” he said.
Capture-the-flag exercises go awry
Anthropic said the incidents – which it labeled an “operational failure” – involved three separate models: Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Mythos 5 and an internal research test model.
The earliest cases date back to April and occurred in evaluation environments that intentionally lacked safeguards so Anthropic could assess what its AI was capable of.
Its models were tasked with so-called “capture-the-flag” challenges, fictional scenarios in which they had to find hidden information in simulated networks.
In one incident, Claude Opus 4.7 was given a fictional target company, which turned out to share the name of a business in the real world. The AI model then found and exploited bugs that let it access credentials and a database of that business. Opus 4.7 rationalized that what seemed to pertain to the real world must have been part of the simulation Anthropic had set up, the AI startup said.
A separate incident involved Anthropic’s newer, not-public test model, which independently halted its attack after realizing the target it reached was real. This behavior has made Anthropic cautiously optimistic about its progress to make AI behave appropriately, “but we would need to perform more testing to be confident in this conclusion,” it said.
Anthropic said it suspended all cyber evaluations on July 23. It notified the affected organizations on July 27, two of which were unaware of the activity before being contacted. Anthropic said it continues to reach out to the third company.
One of its third-party evaluation partners, a cybersecurity lab called Irregular, told Reuters that it has an ongoing investigation into the incidents.
OpenAI’s Altman in talks with senators, white house
Anthropic said the incidents underscore a need for stronger controls in both internal and third-party testing environments as AI models become increasingly capable of carrying out real-world cyber activities.
Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, which operates a competing AI lab, responded to the news on X by saying “this will happen frequently as AI becomes smarter and more agentic,” referring to computer programs or “agents” that act with limited human intervention.
The OpenAI agent that broke into Hugging Face, a platform used by developers to host and collaborate on AI models, went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn’t catch until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was informed, Reuters has previously reported.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this week he has discussed the hack with senators on Capitol Hill, and an OpenAI spokesperson said he planned to discuss upcoming AI models and testing with the White House.
Washington has started tightening oversight of new model rollouts. On June 2, U.S. President Donald Trump directed advisers to develop a voluntary cybersecurity testing framework for the most advanced AI, including input from the technology’s developers.
Anthropic earlier restricted access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the U.S. temporarily issued an export control directive, citing national security concerns.
Türkiye’s second-largest airport became Europe’s fastest-growing aviation hub in the first half of 2026, according to a European airport trade body on Thursday.
Istanbul Sabiha Gökçen International Airport increased its passenger traffic by 6.4% year-over-year in the January-June period, a report by the ACI Europe said.
That marked the highest growth rate in the “Majors” category, which includes European hubs handling more than 40 million passengers.
ACI Europe said passenger traffic at European airports rose 2.6% in the first half of the year compared with the same period a year earlier.
The traffic growth slowed from 4.3% in the first quarter to 1.3% in the second quarter. Domestic passenger traffic increased 3%, while international passenger traffic rose 2.5%.
According to the report, passenger traffic at airports across Türkiye increased 2.8% in the first six months of the year.
Growth at Sabiha Gökçen, located on Istanbul’s Asian side, exceeded both the European and national averages.
The report said Barcelona Airport ranked second in the “Majors” category with 4.4% growth, followed by Madrid Airport with 4.2%, Istanbul Airport with 1.6% and Rome Fiumicino Airport with 0.3%.
London Heathrow remained the busiest European airport, welcoming a record 40 million passengers in the first half of the year, a 0.2% year-over-year increase.
The British hub kept being closely followed by Istanbul Airport, which increased its passenger count by 1.6% to 39.84 million.
Ford is preparing for the possibility that Chinese automakers could enter the American market in the next five to 10 years, even though the country has erected numerous trade barriers to cars from China, the company’s CEO Jim Farley told employees on Thursday.
That’s according to a report by Reuters, which cited three people who viewed the meeting.
Farley has been among the most vocal about how competitive Chinese auto giants like BYD are in the industry. Ford is preparing to roll out a family of affordable electric vehicles that it engineered from the ground up to match the cost and efficiency of the Chinese companies.
The Ford chief, along with other senior leaders, said in a question-and-answer portion of a town hall that it is more likely Chinese companies would enter the market at the latter end of that range. The comments come as the U.S. Senate is pushing to expand a ban on Chinese car sales in the world’s second-largest and most lucrative auto market.
A Ford spokesperson declined to comment on discussions that took place during a private meeting with employees.
Leaders at the Dearborn, Michigan, automaker have previously warned that China was on America’s doorstep, but have not been as specific with the time frame as executives were in the Thursday meeting.
Ford Executive Chair Bill Ford spoke on the topic earlier this month.
“We have to go toe-to-toe with China,” Ford said at an Axios event. “We can’t expect to keep them out forever, and we have to be able to beat them at their own game.”
Chinese automakers have gained significant market share in neighboring Mexico, and under a trade deal with Canada are allowed to sell a limited number of EVs there. Auto industry experts see Canada, which is very similar to its U.S. neighbor, as a test market for Chinese automakers that are eager to sell to American consumers.
American consumers have signaled increasing interest in these models, surveys show, especially as affordable electric options are scant.
The U.S. currently blocks Chinese electric vehicles through tariffs of about 100%, in addition to U.S. Commerce Department rules banning Chinese software by model year 2027 and hardware by model year 2030.
The connected-vehicle rules were adopted in January 2025 under U.S. President Joe Biden, based on national security concerns around data privacy, and have been kept in place under the Trump administration. Automakers, including Ford, have worked to obtain authorizations under the rule to continue selling some China-produced vehicles in the United States.
While the automaker is not yet competing with China in the U.S., it certainly is abroad.
In an attempt to revive sales in Europe’s cut-throat market, where Chinese automakers are gobbling up market share, Ford recently announced a joint venture with China’s Geely. While the partnership was criticized by some U.S. lawmakers, Ford said Chinese competition in the region was prompting every carmaker to get “leaner and smarter,” which was the goal behind the Geely deal.
Türkiye’s unemployment rate fell 0.5 percentage points month-on-month to 7.6% in June, marking the lowest level since monthly records began in 2005, official data showed on Thursday.
The number of unemployed people aged 15 and over decreased by 168,000 from the previous month to 2.69 million, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat).
The unemployment rate stood at 6.5% among men, and 9.8% among women.
The number of employed people rose by 227,000 month-on-month to 32.73 million in June, while the employment rate increased by 0.3 percentage points to 48.9%.
The employment rate was 66.1% for men and 32% for women.
Türkiye’s labor force expanded by 58,000 people to 35.42 million, with the labor force participation rate edging up by 0.1 percentage points to 52.9%.
The participation rate was 70.7% among men and 35.4% among women.
Youth unemployment, covering the 15-24 age group, dropped by 1.8 percentage points from the previous month to 12.8%.
The youth unemployment rate was estimated at 10.4% for men and 17.3% for women.
The composite measure of labor underutilization, which includes unemployment, time-related underemployment and the potential labor force, declined by 2 percentage points to 28.8%.
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