Drone footage of a snowy forest illustrates how AI can identify a small human figure.
Ukraine will give allied companies free access to military training data in exchange for software licences for its armed forces.
Ukraine is opening a collection of five million battlefield videos to defence companies in allied countries. The move will help firms train artificial intelligence systems while strengthening Ukraine’s security partnerships.
The repository, called Avenger Labs, also contains audio and text collected over nearly five years of war. About 30 Ukrainian defence companies already use the database to develop AI weapons.
Under the first agreement, 12 British defence companies will gain access to the collection. Meanwhile, Ukraine is holding talks with other countries about access.
The government offers the data free of charge. However, participating companies must give Ukraine’s military licences for any software they develop.
Why battlefield videos matter for military AI
Military AI systems need examples of how people fight to learn how to identify them in combat settings. Similarly, chatbots learn from large amounts of human writing.
One example illustrates the challenge: drone footage shows a forest of dark trunks, shadows and patches of snow. The landscape appears empty to a human viewer. Yet an AI system marks a tiny human figure with a red box, identifying a possible soldier among the trees.
Such detection relies on large volumes of training data. While many Western companies are developing autonomous weapons, they face a shortage of material to train those systems.
Ukraine’s wartime collection offers more of that data than any other potential partner can provide. By exchanging access for software licences, Ukraine also secures military use of the tools participating companies develop.
