Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years scanning streets, parks and storefronts to earn in-game rewards. Most had no idea those scans could end up training navigation technology now headed into military drones and autonomous robots.
Nearly 30 billion environmental scans collected from Pokémon Go players since 2021 were allegedly used by Niantic Spatial to develop a camera-based Visual Positioning System, or VPS, capable of locating a machine without GPS signals, according to a report published June 5 by Dutch newspaper Trouw.
In December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, a U.S. defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to integrate that ground-level navigation system with Vantor’s aerial software for use in military drones, ground robots and dismounted field personnel.
Vantor holds a U.S. government contract to support what the company has described as critical national security missions.
The scanning feature was technically optional. Starting in 2021, Pokémon Go introduced AR mapping tasks that prompted players to record short videos of real-world locations, particularly PokéStops, in exchange for in-game items. Players who opted in agreed to a separate end-user license agreement granting Niantic broad rights to the scan data. The game’s economy, built on microtransactions, created strong financial incentives for players to participate, according to reporting by Nintendo Wire.
The pipeline that connects the mobile game to the battlefield runs through three distinct steps. Players scanned the physical world. Niantic Spatial used those scans to build a 3D model that enables camera-based navigation when satellite signals are unavailable, jammed or spoofed. Vantor then licensed access to that capability for deployment in defense platforms.
The partnership, announced Dec. 16, 2025, describes a joint system that allows drones, vehicles and field teams to share a common coordinate framework without relying on GPS, a capability that has become increasingly central to modern military operations as adversaries improve GPS-jamming and spoofing technology.
Vantor denied using raw Pokémon Go imagery in its systems, but declined to confirm whether its deployed navigation model was trained on those scans, according to AI Weekly.
“Once scans are absorbed into an AI model, proving their presence or absence becomes nearly impossible,” said Jeroen van den Hoven, an ethics professor cited in the Trouw report.
In March 2025, Niantic Labs sold its gaming division, including Pokémon Go, to mobile publisher Scopely for $3.5 billion. Scopely is owned by Savvy Games Group, a Saudi state-backed investor. The spatial AI business was carved out separately as Niantic Spatial, retaining the 30 billion scan database and led by Niantic co-founder John Hanke with $250 million in startup funding. That separation means the players now using Pokémon Go under Scopely’s ownership are not under the same entity that holds their historical scan data.
