Palantir helps Ukraine train interceptor drone brains

Beleaguered country, unfortunately, has plenty of data from its conflict

Ukraine is getting a little AI help with its war against Russia. The country is giving Palantir a new level of access to critical warfighting data so its interceptor drones can become more autonomous. 

Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in a LinkedIn post this week that Palantir was helping the MoD and the country's defense tech partnership platform Brave1 build what it's calling a "Dataroom" that will help equip interceptor drones with AI capabilities. 

Interceptor drones, for those unaware, are drones designed to take down other drones, like the Shahed-type drones commonly used by Russian armed forces. 

"Interceptor drones have already proven their effectiveness and cost-efficiency in real combat conditions," Fedorov explained. "But defending against thousands of drones requires autonomy — the ability for an interceptor drone to detect, identify, track, and neutralize targets independently."

The Dataroom will allow Ukrainian defense companies that apply to join the program to train and validate their AI models for tasks like target detection, classification, and interception, on real-world battlefield data gathered since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

"Dataroom is built on software solutions from the American technology company Palantir and already contains collections of visual and thermal databases of aerial targets, including Shahed drones," Brave1 said in its own statement. 

Both Fedorov and Brave1 said that the type and volume of data available in the Dataroom would be expanded over time, and that the project's scope would widen to other autonomy and AI-related areas, with autonomizing drones being "the most urgent task," according to the defense minister. 

"No country in the world has faced the kind of aerial threats that Ukraine confronts today. Every night, hundreds of airborne threats are intercepted," Fedorov added. "Brave1 Dataroom represents a major step toward reliably protecting our people, energy infrastructure, and the country from enemy air attacks."

Beyond the note that Palantir's software solutions formed the underpinnings of the Dataroom, it's not clear what the US company's input or influence on the Dataroom would be. It's also not clear whether Palantir would be able to absorb the data fed into the Dataroom for its own AI training purposes, either. 

Louis Mosley, executive vice president of Palantir and head of the company's UK and EU operations, told the Washington Post in a recent interview that Ukraine has a unique opportunity to actualize thousands of hours of war data - with Palantir's help, of course. 

"There is no other country, sadly, that has that data asset," Mosley said. "They are uniquely positioned to begin exploiting it."

Mosley explained that Ukraine, via the Dataroom, would be using Palantir software to curate, synthesize, and normalize its data to prepare it for training autonomous drone algorithms. 

US tech giants like Palantir have turned Ukraine into a laboratory for AI-enabled warfare, with various experiments and data-driven training initiatives being fueled by the fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces. Palantir has been there since early in the war, offering its MetaConstellation software to the country mere months after fighting broke out. 

Palantir didn't respond to questions for this story. ®