KYIV, Ukraine — The British Ministry of Defence has struck a partnership with Ukraine’s Avengers AI Labs, an information-rich platform built to train AI for battlefield drones, marking the first time that Kyiv has opened up its trove of wartime data to an outside government, according to officials in London.
The announcement comes a month after U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham signed an AI deal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy while visiting Kyiv alongside other allies to honor Ukraine’s independence day and pledge continued support to the war-torn nation.
“Ukraine is the frontline of freedom for us all. On my recent visit to Kyiv, I saw first-hand the courage and resilience of the Ukrainian people,” U.K. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting said in a statement on Friday.
“I also saw the extraordinary innovation which is allowing them to repel Putin’s illegal and unprovoked invasion.”
“This world-first access to real battlefield data will allow British companies to continue pushing the frontier of defence innovation, deterring our enemies and making us safer at home as well as further strengthening Ukraine,” Streeting said.
Ukraine has shared its combat-derived AI training data with allies in the past, but this is the first time that Kyiv has granted a foreign country access to the machine-learning infrastructure driving its rapid AI innovations seen across the front.
Avengers AI Labs holds an annotated dataset of more than 5 million battlefield frames, plus sensor data covering millions of object detections — including tanks, artillery, air defense, infantry, Shahed drones, reconnaissance UAVs, and more) — built mainly from Ukraine’s DELTA battle-management system, according to a release by Ukrainian officials.
Data is anonymized and released on a delay to avoid endangering personnel still fighting, according to Ukraine’s Defence Ministry. U.K. companies also work inside a secure perimeter that doesn’t allow them to download the underlying dataset, according to Ukraine’s MOD.
The British defense ministry is now inviting up to a dozen companies to submit proposals for how they would use the platform, especially to develop tech that would enable full functionality even when communications are degraded or satellite navigation is unavailable.
“It is exactly the kind of practical partnership the Taskforce was set up to drive, supporting our ally Ukraine while strengthening sovereign capability here in Britain,” U.K. AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said in Friday’s statement.
Katie Livingstone is the Ukraine correspondent for Defense News and Military Times. Based in Kyiv, she has covered Russia’s full-scale invasion since its first days. She is a former Fulbright fellow whose award-winning work has appeared in outlets across Europe and the U.S.
