British defence companies will be allowed to train artificial intelligence models on more than five million annotated frames of Ukrainian battlefield footage under a new UK-Ukraine programme, with the United Kingdom becoming the first international partner to gain access to Ukraine’s Avengers Labs platform, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence.
Up to 12 British companies will be selected through a Ministry of Defence competition, with their AI models tested and trained inside the secure Avengers Labs environment rather than being given access to download the underlying dataset. The first competition is focused on models for uncrewed systems operating in difficult battlefield conditions, particularly where communications with human operators are unreliable or access to global navigation satellite systems is limited.
The platform is built around more than five million annotated battlefield images, most collected through uncrewed systems and Ukraine’s DELTA combat system. The material is anonymised and delayed before use, and includes imagery of tanks, artillery, air defence systems, infantry and aerial targets such as Shahed-type attack drones and reconnaissance UAVs. Ukraine says the dataset is continually updated as new battlefield material is collected.
A major focus of the UK-Ukraine work will be AI for groups and swarms of uncrewed systems, allowing individual platforms to share information, identify threats and enemy targets and operate with less direct human control. Ukraine said such technology could support missions ranging from logistics to precision targeting, while the first British competition is specifically intended to test how well systems continue functioning when communications or navigation are degraded.
The selection is being led by the UK’s Rapid AI Delivery Task Force, with up to 12 companies whose proposals meet requirements set by the British and Ukrainian defence ministries expected to be chosen within weeks. Access to Avengers Labs will follow once Ukrainian export-control procedures have been completed.
The programme follows an artificial intelligence partnership agreement between the two countries, signed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Ukraine said the arrangement forms part of the wider 100-year partnership between Britain and Ukraine.
More than 30 Ukrainian defence companies are already using Avengers Labs to train their own models, with three products developed through the platform now being used on the battlefield. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence says AI tools are already reducing the time analysts spend searching photographs and video for enemy targets by as much as 90%.
For British companies, the attraction is access to battlefield data that would be extremely difficult to reproduce through normal exercises or synthetic datasets, while the secure model means the underlying combat material remains inside the Ukrainian system. The result is a way for British developers to test AI against the same communications failures, navigation problems and target-recognition conditions being encountered in the war in Ukraine without taking possession of the raw dataset itself.
I really hope there are sufficient safe guards in place to stop US access to this data. This is possibly the biggest treasure trove for defence companies and weapons research and America has no right to it given their disgusting behaviour abandoning their allies in the middle of a war and siding with then enemy.
Heavy restrictions should be put on BAE as well to prevent sharing with its US business units.