Prime Minister Andy Burnham and President Volodymyr Zelensky signed an AI partnership in Kyiv on Aug. 24 giving Britain first international access to Ukraine’s Avengers AI Labs database, 10 Downing Street announced.
Avengers collects data from “thousands of daylight cameras and infrared sensors across the battlefield in Ukraine,” capturing “millions of objects, such as tanks, artillery, air defence systems, infantry, and aerial targets,” to train AI models. The release calls it “a goldmine of battlefield data” giving British firms “the opportunity to ‘plug and play.’” In exchange, Ukraine gets access to Britain’s universities, researchers and the “third largest AI eco-system in the world.”
Ukraine has what money cannot buy in machine learning — millions of images of real targets under real conditions — and Britain has the compute.
How will the UK use the system? “The first of the trial technology is about to be rolled out at a UK defense site to protect bases from protestors and hostile actors trying to gain intelligence.” The system “turns buried fibre-optic cables into a giant AI-enabled sensor,” and the release adds that it “could be rolled out to protect airports, prisons and even railways and energy plants in the future.” Protesters and foreign agents appear together, as one category of object to be detected, by a system trained on a war.
Burnham said the partnership will “better protect our critical infrastructure and growth in every postcode here at home.” AI Minister Kanishka Narayan said, “This is AI sovereignty in practice: building our own capabilities and turning frontline experience into systems that protect our armed forces overseas and our critical infrastructure at home.” A second project will develop low-power AI chips for “future drones, robotics and autonomous systems.”
The agreement was announced the same day as the release of classified data allowing SCALP missile assembly in Ukraine, and forms part of what London calls the UK-Ukraine “100 Year Partnership.”
