UK, Ukraine sign AI defence partnership linked to battlefield technology

Britain confirmed it had signed a partnership with Ukraine to jointly develop artificial intelligence tools for defence and security, giving British researchers access to a Ukrainian battlefield data platform used to train military AI systems.



Prime Minister Andy Burnham and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed the agreement in Kyiv, making Britain the first international partner to access Ukraine's Avengers AI Labs.



Avengers Labs was built around an annotated dataset of 5 million battlefield images, Ukraine's Defence Ministry said earlier in August, largely drawn from the military's DELTA combat system - a domestically developed battlefield management and situational-awareness system.



The platform uses data collected from cameras and sensors across Ukraine's battlefield, including information on tanks, artillery systems, drones and other military targets.



The Ukrainian ministry said AI models trained on the data were already being used in an automated target-detection system that analyses more than 100,000 drone video feeds each month and can identify about 70 per cent of enemy targets in real time.