Breach Notification — the 72-Hour Rule for AI Incidents
Article 12/5 requires a veri sorumlusu to notify the Authority within 72 hours of becoming aware of a breach — not 72 hours from when the breach occurred. The clock starts on discovery, which is exactly why detection speed is itself a compliance control, not just an ops concern.
What counts as a breach for an agent
Nothing about Art. 12 is AI-specific, but agent deployments create breach modes that don't fit the mental model of "database got hacked":
- Over-sharing across sessions or users — an agent surfaces one person's data in another's session (a context-isolation failure, not an intrusion).
- Prompt injection that exfiltrates data — a crafted input gets the agent to disclose personal data it had legitimate access to but should not have revealed to that requester.
- Output leakage into logs or third-party tooling — personal data in a prompt or completion lands in an observability/logging pipeline that wasn't scoped as part of the original processing activity.
- Multi-agent handoff exposure — a downstream agent in a pipeline receives more than it needed, and that over-broad handoff is itself the incident. Etken Yapay Zekâ (Agentic AI) Guidance — KVKK's March 2026 Framework treats traceable handoffs as a control precisely because this failure mode is otherwise invisible.
Each of these is a personal-data breach in the ordinary Art. 12 sense the first time it's discovered — "the AI did it" changes nothing about the notification obligation.
The notification itself
- To the Authority: online, via the Kurul's Veri İhlal Bildirim Formu, within 72 hours of awareness. The form asks for the incident date, nature of the breach, number of affected individuals, data categories involved, and mitigating measures already taken.
- To affected individuals: required when the breach poses a high risk to their rights and freedoms, communicated within a reasonable time — KVKK does not fix a second hard deadline the way it does for the Authority.
- Missing the window is an Art. 18 administrative-fine matter. Market commentary reports 2026 fine ceilings rising materially year over year; treat any specific figure as directional and check the Authority's current fine schedule before using one in a client-facing document.
Why this belongs next to the deployment patterns
Pattern 2 (decide where transcripts live before go-live) and Pattern 5 (keep a decision trail) both exist partly for this moment: when something goes wrong, "what data did the agent have access to, and who did it talk to" is the first question, and a system with no compiled record of its own processing activity answers it slowly. The 72-hour clock does not pause while you reconstruct what happened.
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Educational reference maintained by Avalanche AI — not legal advice, and not incident-response guidance for a live breach. If you are inside the 72-hour window right now, go to kvkk.gov.tr and your own counsel, not this page.