Ukraine will own the AI models that up to 12 British companies train on its battlefield drone footage, under a UK Ministry of Defence competition that now closes on Sunday 25 October.
The competition is run by the MoD’s Rapid AI Delivery Taskforce. It offers three months’ free access to Avengers Labs, a Ukrainian government platform holding more than 5 million frames of labelled drone footage. The goal is autonomous drone swarms. The deadline was 22 October; the MoD moved it after a fault in its submission portal.
The access is free, but the work is unpaid. The chosen firms “shall bear all of the costs” of the first phase, the competition document says. In early 2027 up to five of them can win funded contracts. The MoD’s written answers to bidders, published on 16 October, put that money at about £1.25 million, excluding VAT, for all five together.
The footage never leaves Ukraine. Firms run their own code inside a sandbox, with computing time of roughly one Nvidia A100 chip each. Avengers Labs staff review that code to stop the data leaking out through training.
Ukraine’s defence ministry then owns the trained model weights. The British firm keeps its own software and gets a sublicence to the weights through the MoD. That licence covers only military equipment for British and Ukrainian forces, made and sold in the two countries.
The data is daylight and infrared video of tanks, artillery, air defence systems, infantry and aerial targets. The MoD’s answers say it includes thousands of interceptions by Ukrainian interceptor drones. The clips do not record where they were filmed or whether an interception worked. Ukraine plans to add location data next year.
The platform also holds no data on decisions. Yet “distributed decision-making”, drones sharing out tasks without a single controller, is one of the four problems the competition asks firms to solve. The MoD’s answer is that the footage trains the perception those systems build on.
Kyiv sets the terms of entry too. Nobody with a link to Russia, an offshore zone or a sanctioned country may work on the project. Firms must send Ukraine’s defence ministry the names of every staff member three working days before starting. Ukrainian intelligence and law enforcement agencies can revoke anyone’s access “at any time”.
Use of the finished models is Ukraine’s decision. One prospective bidder asked for assurance that its work would be used with “clear human accountability”, words from the MoD’s own competition document. The MoD replied that Ukraine’s defence ministry decides deployment under Ukrainian law.
Britain became the first foreign partner on Avengers Labs under a deal signed in Kyiv on 24 August by Prime Minister Andy Burnham and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Defence Secretary Wes Streeting called it “world-first access to real battlefield data”. The MoD will tell the selected companies by 6 November.
