Data from Pokemon GO players is now used to train US military drones

Niantic received a ton of real world data scans from Pokemon GO players who scanned streets, parks, and even buildings around them. Now it has emerged that the data is now being used by the US military for its drones. Niantic Spatial owns the data it received in Pokemon GO and it is set to be put into drones and military robots. Pokemon GO players had no idea that their data would be used in this way. You can read more about this topic here.

“Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and they helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots. Most of the players had no idea.

The pipeline runs from a mobile game to the battlefield in three steps. Players scanned the physical world. Niantic Spatial turned those scans into a 3D map that lets a machine locate itself by sight when satellite signals fail. And in December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, the defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to fuse that ground-level system with Vantor’s aerial navigation software for use in GPS-denied operations.”