Ukraine is turning millions of hours of battlefield footage into fuel for its defense industry's AI. Ukraine's Defense Ministry has announced that it has opened Avengers Labs, a platform for training artificial intelligence models, to Ukrainian defense companies.
The platform is a new piece of the defense-tech ecosystem Ukraine has built around its war. Alongside the Brave1 cluster that funds and codifies weapons and the Test in Ukraine framework that trials them in combat, Avengers Labs supplies the raw material for AI, a vast, curated dataset of Russian military targets that a single private company could never assemble on its own.
The data comes from the battlefield
Avengers Labs was developed by the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies, the team behind the DELTA battle-management system, and most of its data comes from DELTA and is constantly expanded.
The dataset captures the enemy in detail. It contains images of tanks, artillery, air-defense systems, infantry, and aerial targets, including Shahed drones and reconnaissance UAVs, a labeled library of what Russian forces look like from a drone's camera. According to the ministry, the system can significantly speed up the development of AI solutions for unmanned systems.
The AI already works in combat
A system trained on Avengers data is already in the field, analyzing over 100,000 drone video streams a month and detecting about 70% of enemy targets in real time, day and night.
The models enable more autonomous drones. Trained on Avengers data, they support automatic trajectory correction after an operator marks a target, and independent target detection by a drone in a defined area according to set mission logic, steps toward drones that find and strike targets with less human input, according to the ministry.
Partner-country firms can join too
Access extends beyond Ukraine, under vetting. The first Ukrainian defense companies have signed licensing agreements to use Avengers Labs, and companies from Ukraine's partner countries can also join, per the ministry.
The screening guards against leakage to the enemy. To gain access, companies must pass checks confirming no ties to the aggressor state, no business in Russia, no sanctions, and no activity in occupied territories.
