Pokemon Go scans used to locate military drones

A spatial AI system built using data from Pokémon Go players is being used to guide military drones without GPS. In December 2025, Niantic Spatial (the spin-off behind Pokémon Go) partnered with Vantor, an American defense intelligence agency that develops spatial detection software for drones.

How? In 2021, Niantic offered gameplay bonuses for scanning real-world objects like streets, buildings, parks and trees. Users obliged, creating billions of visual data points. These were used to train Niantic’s foundational models, such as its Visual Positioning System (VPS), which allows a camera to determine its location based on what it sees, without needing a satellite connection. The company emphasizes that user scans weren’t shared with a third party; rather, the player data was used to train the models, which have since been integrated with Vantor’s Raptor software and two decades’ worth of the company’s 3D satellite terrain maps.

Why? To perform “GPS-denied” missions — areas where satellite signals are blocked, spoofed or disrupted. According to Niantic and Vantor, their joint solution reduces navigation error by up to 70%, and achieves an accuracy of approximately 1.5 meters. As a point of reference, Vantor received a US Army contract worth up to $217 million in February 2026 for a project called One World Terrain. Niantic also sold its gaming business to Scopely for $3.5 billion in March 2025, so it needed to find alternative revenue streams.

1The part that should give you pause

“These [user] scans were submitted voluntarily by players who opted into the feature and were covered by the privacy and terms-of-service policies,” says Niantic Spatial. And they’re right. Technically speaking, they didn’t lie to you. But the implications of your actions went way beyond what you saw on the consent dialog box.

That’s the key takeaway here, and it’s not limited to gaming. If you share data for minor convenience, it could be used to power a completely different application, since it’s used to train a model that lives beyond the app and the permission dialog. There’s no going back once a model has been trained — your data becomes a weight, and it’s never leaving. It’s up to the organization that holds the model to decide what happens next.

Don’t get me wrong — I still scan QR codes and use AR just like the rest of you. But this is a clear illustration of why you shouldn’t think of permissions requests in terms of “it’s just a game.” It doesn’t matter if the company is trustworthy right now; you need to consider what might happen to your data after you lose control over it.