In a rather bleak new report from Drone XL, it has been stated that roughly 30 billion environmental scans acquired by Niantic through Pokémon GO have been used to train US military drones and robots. For years now, Pokémon GO has offered bonuses to players who scan their surroundings, which Niantic has then taken and sold off to US defense contractor Vantor, among others.
Starting in 2021, Pokémon GO introduced a feature to record short videos of real-world locations, often PokéStops, that would earn players extra in-game items. While an entirely optional feature, it was heavily incentivized by the way GO’s in-game economy works, which is built off of microtransactions. When players opted into this new feature, they unknowingly agreed to a separate EULA that granted Niantic the permission to sell data gathered from these videos to third-party sources, in this case defense firms.
As Drone XL writes, “The collected scans, around 30 billion of them according to Trouw [a Dutch outlet], became the raw material for a Visual Positioning System, or VPS… Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon, who previously led the team behind Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View, has said the approach suits robots operating where GPS regularly drops out, such as dense cities, and where signals are deliberately blocked, such as war zones.”
Speaking to Trouw, player Floris De Hingh (34) said, “I was just playing a game,” when confronted with the information. A player since Pokémon GO launched in 2016, he never imagined that his data might be training an AI system that would be deployed by the US military into war zones. Since Niantic has been in a partnership with defense contractor Vantor since 2025, Trouw questioned the firm about what it intends to use the data for. Vantor denies it will employ data collected from Pokémon GO, but would not state if its upcoming defense model was trained on the same information.
A lot of the article goes over background information that paints a pretty dire picture of Niantic, but is beyond the scope of this article. I imagine Nintendo is also not particularly happy that its flagship franchise is being used to train a military model that could result in war crimes.
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