Special Report: Ukraine opens up battlefield-AI platform for foreign training

An image illustrating an AI model being trained in a secure environment, released on 25 September 2026. (Ukrainian MoD)

UK companies with access to Ukraine's Avengers Labs for training their AI models will have full access to its environment but will be permitted to see less than 1% of the underlying data, the Head of AI at Avengers Labs and Ukraine's Delta battle management system (BMS), told Janes on 1 October 2026.

Avengers Labs is a Ukrainian MoD platform that enables defence organisations to train and test artificial intelligence models using categorised, machine-readable data gathered from the battlefield. “They [company staff] will be able to see, for instance, the distribution of weather conditions to understand that there may be a bias against winter or summer for some of the data,” said the Head of AI at Avengers Labs and Delta, and a senior representative of Ukraine's Centre of Innovation and Defence Technologies Development, part of Ukraine's Ministry of Defence (MoD), who both spoke to Janes on condition of anonymity. “It's important to know that we provide a platform without exposing the raw data directly to people,” he said.

Avengers platform

On 24 August 2026 the UK and Ukraine made a joint declaration of intent on a bilateral AI partnership. This partnership is intended to enable access to Ukraine's Avengers Labs platform battlefield database for training AI models. Access to the database will be initially available for up to 12 UK companies with their proposals needing to be applicable to both Ukrainian and British defence requirements, according to a UK MoD press release on 25 September. The UK companies will be chosen by a competition covering four areas: autonomous target recognition, distributed decision-making, adaptive mission execution, and collaborative sensing/information fusion, it added.