Ukraine's Ministry of Defence announced on 25 September 2026 that the United Kingdom will be the first foreign partner whose defence companies can use Avengers Labs, the ministry's platform for training artificial intelligence models for unmanned systems on footage and sensor data collected in combat. Up to 12 British companies will be able to train and test their models there. The ministry said participants cannot download the data or move it outside the platform, and must train their models inside its secure perimeter.
More than 30 Ukrainian defence companies already use Avengers Labs, according to the ministry, and three AI products developed on the platform are now in use at the front. Those figures come from the ministry alone, and no independent source has confirmed them. The ministry said it was opening the platform to international cooperation to combine Ukraine's combat experience with the technical capabilities of its partners in developing AI for unmanned systems.
Avengers Labs holds an annotated dataset of more than 5 million frames collected on the battlefield, along with sensor data covering more than 6 million object detections, according to the ministry. The imagery comes from daylight and thermal cameras on Ukrainian drones and reaches the platform through DELTA, the battle management system used by Ukraine's armed forces. The labelled objects include tanks, artillery, air defence systems, infantry, Shahed-type attack drones and reconnaissance drones. The ministry said the data is anonymised and released on a delay so that it poses no risk to troops in combat, and that AI tools built on it have cut the time analysts in the Defence Forces spend searching photos and video for enemy targets by up to 90 per cent.
Britain's Ministry of Defence will choose the companies through a competition run by its Rapid AI Delivery Task Force. The ministry is inviting up to a dozen firms to submit proposals, with a focus on systems that keep working when communications are degraded or satellite navigation is unavailable. The competition covers autonomous target recognition, distributed decision-making, mission execution under constrained communications and information sharing across platforms and sensors, with applications in drone swarms that a small number of operators can direct. Winners will get access after Ukraine completes its export control procedures, which the Ukrainian ministry expects to take a few weeks.
Wes Streeting, the UK defence secretary, said: "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." Kanishka Narayan, the UK minister for AI, said: "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."
Andy Burnham, the UK prime minister, and Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, signed the AI partnership behind the arrangement in Kyiv on 24 August 2026. The UK government said then that Britain would gain access to the Avengers AI Labs database and that three British start-ups had begun pilot projects with Ukrainian partners: Sintela of Bristol, Mind Foundry of Oxford and Skyral of London. One pilot uses fibre-optic cable sensors to protect bases, and the other is developing low-power AI chips for drones and autonomous systems.
