TL;DR

Up to 12 British companies will be allowed to train AI on combat data collected in Ukraine, under a Ministry of Defence competition to develop software for drone swarms. The UK is the first foreign partner given access to Ukraine’s Avengers AI Labs database. It follows the defence AI push Andy Burnham launched in New York last week, and arrives while the UK has still not signed an international declaration on keeping AI under human control.

What is on offer

The Avengers database is built from footage and images captured by Ukrainian drones, in both daylight and thermal. It logs more than 6 million detected objects, from tanks, artillery and infantry to air defence systems and aircraft such as Shahed drones. Ukraine uses it to build, train and test its own AI models.

Access follows an agreement Burnham reached with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. The MOD has now asked UK firms to pitch their plans for the data. This competition is the UK-Ukraine AI Partnership’s first, and every entry has to serve Ukrainian as well as British military needs. Winners will be chosen within weeks and start work soon afterwards.

The MOD wants proposals in four areas: recognising targets automatically, spreading decisions across many drones rather than one controller, coordinating missions when links are weak, and pooling what several sensors see. One hoped-for outcome is swarms that carry on working through jammed links or without satellite positioning. The work sits with Taskforce RAID, the MOD’s rapid AI delivery team.

Why it matters

The government’s case is that a few sailors, soldiers or aircrew might control whole fleets of drones, for jobs ranging from resupply runs to submarine-hunting in the North Atlantic, “always with appropriate human involvement”. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting called it “world-first access to real battlefield data”.

The announcement builds on the UK-US defence AI partnership unveiled at the UN General Assembly. When Jade Leung moved to AISI last week, AI minister Kanishka Narayan listed the Ukraine AI deal among her achievements.

Looking forward

For UK defence technology companies, real combat data is the scarce input, and this gives a small group of them a head start. The harder question is oversight. Target recognition and distributed decision-making are exactly the functions that the 22-nation declaration on human control is concerned with, and the UK has yet to sign it. How the MOD defines “appropriate human involvement” in these contracts will be worth watching.