Bad actors could acquire the data, but purchase controls already mitigate that risk. Intelligence operatives scrutinize potential customers’ infrastructure for ways that data could reach enemies or nefarious actors. 

Training data creates a new tracing problem, though. Whereas the movement of commercial datasets can be followed when planted contact details appear two steps from the original buyer, the provenance of AI training data vanishes in a manner embedded in the technology itself. Another risk is that this use of the data creates an extractive economy in which wealthier countries far from danger benefit from the mortal threat borne by frontline states, potentially creating a market incentive for war to continue as an unending mine for digital gold. 

A fraught new frontier

Existing laws regulate how militaries may conduct war. But they say almost nothing about what happens when records created in combat are stripped of their operational context, packaged as data, and licensed to companies whose products circulate far beyond where they were made.

The responsibilities of the companies that design these systems remain unsettled. Ukraine is building access controls, which are mentioned in the newly signed UK-Ukraine AI agreement, but no governments are actively working on regulating what happens when data has been absorbed into a model and crosses back into civilian markets.

Those records contain human lives. The soldiers and civilians visible in them did not agree to become training material for products that might be sold years later. But sensor data, camera footage, and coordinates from civilians fleeing a drone strike now constitute the sorts of data that inform how future machines will make decisions.

That is a problem of consent. Individuals featured in the data—be they targets, controllers, or civilians standing by—become part of the training material. The autonomous capabilities based on that data do not stop at the edge of the battlefield. Such capabilities move into other military or commercial systems like delivery vehicles or agricultural machinery. Errors and assumptions embedded in the data travel with the model even once it enters civilian life.

Battlefield data should not be treated as ordinary commercial material. But there is currently no agency or regulator that has jurisdiction over this issue. In the meantime, governments that provide access to defense data should treat it as they would a controlled weapons transfer, recording its origin, licensing its users, and restricting onward sharing. Ukraine has begun to grapple with this. Its Avengers Labs program allows companies to train models on battlefield data without giving them direct access to sensitive databases. Yet that mitigates only one part of the problem.