Germany, Britain and France have signed their main military AI deals since 2025 with three different kinds of supplier. Germany bought AI-guided loitering munitions, Britain bought a targeting network and an American partner, and France bought a French language model.
Germany: weapons it can cancel
The Bundestag’s budget committee approved frameworks with Helsing and Stark on 25 February, and the Bundeswehr signed purchase contracts the next day. The first call-offs, worth about €270 million each, cover 4,300 of Helsing’s HX-2 and 2,200 of Stark’s Virtus loitering munitions, according to the committee papers reported by ESUT.
The frameworks have milestones at which the Bundeswehr can walk away if a maker fails to prove performance. Each is capped at €1 billion over seven years. Panzerbrigade 45, the German brigade in Lithuania, is first to receive the systems, from 2027.
The committee approved them five weeks after a setback. In January Germany and Ukraine suspended further HX-2 orders for Ukraine after a German army assessment reported aircraft that failed to take off and lacked promised guidance features. Helsing rejected the findings.
Britain: a targeting web and Palantir
Asgard is the British Army’s digital targeting system. It links sensors, decision tools that use AI, and weapons, so that a target can be found and struck faster. The Ministry of Defence said in July 2025 that a prototype had been used on NATO’s Exercise Hedgehog in Estonia. It is to feed a Digital Targeting Web by 2027, funded at more than £1 billion.
In September 2025 the ministry signed a strategic partnership with Palantir. Palantir said it would invest up to £1.5 billion in the UK, and the ministry put the defence opportunities open to the partnership at up to £750 million over five years. The larger figure is Palantir’s own investment, not a British contract.
France: a sovereign model
France went to Mistral AI. A framework the ministry announced on 8 January gives the armed forces, and research bodies such as the CEA and ONERA, access to Mistral’s models, software and services. The models are to run on the ministry’s own infrastructure, and its defence AI agency, AMIAD, manages the deal.
The framework builds on a cooperation agreement of March 2025. Neither its value nor its length has been published.
