Military AI: Ukraine and the UK Sign Cooperation Agreement

The United Kingdom and Ukraine have signed an agreement on artificial intelligence (AI) to bring together the two countries’ efforts to develop new military capabilities and future technologies.

The British government reported this.

Under this agreement, the United Kingdom will become the first international partner to access the Ukrainian platform Avengers AI Labs. This will enable the two countries to accelerate the development of artificial intelligence tools capable of influencing the course of military operations.

Avengers Labs is a platform for training AI models for unmanned systems using real-world battlefield data, developed by the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies. At the core of Avengers Labs is an annotated dataset of five million frames collected during combat operations.

In return, the United Kingdom will support Ukraine through its leading universities, researchers, technology companies, and the world’s third-largest AI ecosystem. Ukraine will be able to draw on British expertise to accelerate the development of solutions to pressing problems, as well as to transform combat experience and unique datasets into technologies that will benefit both countries in the long term.

The collaboration will cover three interrelated areas:

• intergovernmental cooperation on jointly developed models, secure data exchange channels, access to computing resources, and joint assurance of reliability;
• industry collaboration, to be coordinated within the framework of intergovernmental agreements for the development, testing, and implementation of AI-based capabilities related to agreed-upon sets of operational tasks;
• collaboration between academic and research institutions in autonomy, ensuring AI reliability, cybersecurity, and synthetic data.

Engineers, scientists, industry representatives, and military experts with operational experience from both countries will form a joint AI task force to address key national security challenges facing the United Kingdom and Ukraine.

As part of the agreement, several pilot projects have already been launched involving three British startups: Sintela from Bristol, Mind Foundry from Oxford, and Skyral from London.

The first experimental technology will soon be deployed at a UK defense facility. It will protect military bases from protesters and hostile actors attempting to gather intelligence.

The second project involves the United Kingdom and Ukraine jointly exploring the possibility of developing next-generation energy-efficient AI chips for advanced drones, robotic, and autonomous systems.

Over the next few months, the parties are to draw up additional agreements so that “the partnership takes concrete shape from the very beginning and develops at the pace required by our shared security.”

According to the British government, the document was signed after the prime minister authorized MBDA to transfer classified information about the British components of the SCALP long-range missile to localize production in Ukraine.