The UK government has struck a deal with Kyiv to use AI models trained on Ukrainian battlefield data to help protect British defence sites, railways and energy infrastructure from protesters and hostile states. Under the scheme, British companies will gain access to a vast dataset from Ukraine's Avengers AI lab, marking the first agreement of its kind in the UK, with a pilot planned at a UK defence site to build a model capable of identifying protesters or hostile-state attacks using AI-optimised sensors in buried fibre-optic cables. The move follows the embarrassing security breach at RAF Brize Norton last June, when Palestine Action activists entered on scooters and spray-painted two military aircraft.

The four-year cache of Ukrainian military data, including drone footage, strike mission records and flight profiles, offers a far richer training set than the open-source data models have typically relied on elsewhere. Pilot projects have already been approved with three British firms – Sintela, Mind Foundry and Skyral – with Sintela, a Bristol-based fibre-optic sensor specialist, having previously secured a $35m deal to provide US-Mexico border surveillance for the Trump administration. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said the partnership would let British AI expertise combine with Ukraine's data to strengthen national security, though the plan is likely to concern privacy campaigners, and one UCL computer science professor questioned how much genuine improvement the Ukrainian data would bring to already-established sensor technology.