Niantic Denies Pokémon Go Data Shared With Vantor
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- Niantic Spatial told Kotaku that Pokémon Go data is not shared with the company at all, since the game moved to Scopely following the Saudi-government-owned firm's acquisition of Niantic
- Niantic Spatial confirmed its agreement with Vantor, a U.S. defense contractor, was announced last December and remains in early stages, but said sharing Pokémon Go data is not part of the deal
- Trouw and Volkskrant reported that Vantor is preparing to put a navigation model built from roughly 30 billion Pokémon Go scans into drones and other military robots; the reports went viral on social media
- Niantic's AR Scans were opt-in, captured public points of interest like statues and fountains, and were used to train "real-world foundation models" — the models are products of the training data, not copies of the underlying scans, the company said
- Vantor has separately denied that Pokémon Go data was used in the creation of its model, and the company's prior work includes defense and intelligence industries
- The partnership targets GPS-denied drone navigation, aiming to let drones and ground pilots share coordinates even when signals are jammed, spoofed, or otherwise blocked
Why it matters: The viral Dutch reports amplified fears that voluntary AR scans from a mobile game could end up in military drone navigation. Niantic Spatial's denial hinges on a corporate restructuring: since Scopely acquired Niantic, current Pokémon Go data is walled off from Niantic Spatial's Vantor deal. But the ~30 billion historical scans already contributed to Niantic Spatial's training data before the split, so the distinction is about future use, not past collection — and a Saudi-government-owned parent now holds the game data instead.
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