Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with drone wreckage, but the unmanned aircraft have created a new commodity: the vast amounts of data they generate. Ukraine has begun making millions of data points gathered during tens of thousands of drone flights available to military contractors and commercial companies.
The Ukrainian government sees the data-sharing as a way to attract funding and partnerships for the war effort. The arrangement turns active combat zones into training grounds for artificial-intelligence systems, providing companies with conditions that are difficult to reproduce in controlled settings.
Cory Alpert, a researcher at the University of Melbourne who previously served in the Biden White House, argued in an opinion piece that the practice requires new regulatory oversight. He contended that battlefield data should not be treated like ordinary commercial material and called for a regulatory system governing its use.
