Finland’s Ministry of Defense, the Estonian Defense Forces, and the European defense AI lab NestAI signed a letter of intent on June 30, 2026, to jointly develop military artificial intelligence, naming autonomous and unmanned systems, as well as command and control, among the first areas of work.
The agreement carries no financial commitment and instead sets up a framework for shared research, joint development, training, and technical cooperation between the two militaries and the Espoo-based company.
A shared network for defense AI
At the center of the arrangement are the Finnish Defense Forces AI Center of Excellence and Estonia’s Force Transformation Command, two bodies with similar mandates to develop and field AI within their forces.
The stated aim is to build a common pool of expertise that the partners can later expand to other nations and industries, pooling best practices and reducing duplicated effort.
Major General Sami Nurmi, deputy chief of staff for strategy at Defense Command Finland, tied the move to the Finnish data and AI strategy adopted in 2025 and presented the agreement with Estonia as a starting point from which Helsinki hopes to bring in more nations while keeping its capabilities interoperable with allies.
His Estonian counterpart, Major General Viktor Kalnitski, deputy commander of the Estonian Defense Forces, said the document underpins practical cooperation across command and control, unmanned systems, and adaptive decision support, while leaving each nation in sovereign control of its own data and technology.
The work is to be built on open, modular architectures designed to enable systems from different countries to operate together without tying buyers to a single supplier. The first focus areas are adaptive and learning AI, decision support for command and control, and autonomous and unmanned systems, with piloting planned before any wider expansion.
The two militaries plan to roll out the partnership in phases, first identifying pilot projects and then weighing where to expand. The longer-term goal, the partners said, is to fold in more national AI organizations, centers of excellence, and industry partners to seed a wider European defense AI ecosystem.
Why unmanned systems sit at the core
NestAI’s core product, an adaptive operating system called NestOS, is already being positioned for aircraft applications. In May 2026, the Espoo-based company agreed to integrate the software with Patria’s unmanned aerial systems, pairing adaptive autonomy with an in-service aerial platform.
NestAI raised €100 million from Nokia and the Finnish state fund Tesi in late 2025. Its founder, Peter Sarlin, previously built Finnish AI company Silo AI before its sale to AMD. Sarlin said the new Finnish-Estonian cooperation is meant to keep the pace and direction of capability development “in the hands of the nations who operate the systems.”
Those priorities track closely with the pressure now bearing on the region’s airspace.
The Baltic states have logged a steady run of drone incursions linked to the war in Ukraine and to Russian electronic warfare, leading their presidents to press NATO to turn the rotational Baltic Air Policing mission into a full air defense mission with dedicated counter-drone capabilities. Estonia has since redirected a €500 million armored vehicle budget toward counter-drone systems, air defense, and unmanned capabilities.
Finland has faced its own drone spillovers and hosted live trials of industry counter-drone systems at an air defense exercise in November 2025.