Pokémon Go creators Niantic have revealed that they previously used player data to train US military drones.
Augmented reality mobile game Pokémon Go launched in 2016 and encouraged players to explore their real world environments to catch Pokémon. In 2020, the game introduced AR mapping tasks, which offered rewards for scanning buildings using your mobile phone.
Now Niantic has revealed that it’s been using that data to train AI tools that can be found in US military drones and delivery robots. According to the dedicated Niantic Spatial website,”robots, agents, and autonomous systems need world models grounded in physics and geometry, not imagination,” which is where Pokémon Go players come into it.
Using more than 30billion captured images, Niantic’s ‘Visual Positioning System’ turns “aerial and ground capture devices into a precise positioning and orientation sensor, delivering accurate localisation almost anywhere”. According to a report, this camera-based navigation model will be used by a US defense contractor in drones and other military robots.
“The pipeline runs from a mobile game to the battlefield in three steps. Players scanned the physical world,” explained Dronexl. “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.”
“I uninstalled the app the moment it asked me to scan a building to get a reward. There is no reason you’d have to physically scan a building unless they want the 3d/visual/map data of that building, which felt gross and unnatural,” wrote one Reddit user.
“It’s honestly scary genius how they did it. Create a viral game to get people to scan every inch of the world around them. Are you missing a specific spot behind a building? Put a rare Pokémon there. Now you got like 50 scans of that area in a few minutes,” added another. “My boss used to play Pokémon Go on his breaks. We worked in the middle of a military base,” said a third.
In a new statement, Niantic has said it no longer shares Pokémon Go player data. “Now as part of Scopely, Pokémon Go data is not shared with Niantic Spatial. AR Scans collected through Pokémon Go were submitted voluntarily by players who opted into the feature and were subject to the applicable Terms of Service and Privacy Policy at the time. The discontinuation of AR scanning and the end of data sharing with Niantic Spatial were part of the transition planning associated with Pokémon Go’s move to Scopely.”
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