Finland, Estonia, and NestAI Sign Cooperation Agreement to Advance Military AI and Autonomous Drone Systems

Finland, Estonia, and NestAI Sign Military AI Letter of Intent

Finland's Ministry of Defence, the Estonian Defence Forces, and NestAI — a European defence AI laboratory headquartered in Espoo, Finland — formally signed a letter of intent on June 30, 2026, to jointly develop military artificial intelligence. Priority work areas include autonomous unmanned systems and command-and-control (C2) applications.

The agreement carries no financial commitments. Instead, it establishes a framework for shared research, joint development, training, and technical cooperation between the two countries' armed forces and NestAI.

Building a Shared Defence AI Network

The core institutional partners are the Finnish Defence Forces AI Center of Excellence and Estonia's Force Transformation Command — bodies with parallel mandates to advance and deploy AI within their respective militaries.

The stated goal is to build a common pool of expertise that partners can later extend to other nations and industry actors, consolidating best practices and reducing duplicated investment.

Major General Sami Nurmi, Deputy Chief of Staff for Strategy at the Finnish Defence Command, linked the move to Finland's national data and AI strategy adopted in 2025. He described the agreement with Estonia as a starting point, expressing hope that Helsinki could eventually invite additional countries to join while ensuring interoperability with allied capabilities.

Major General Viktor Kalnitski, Deputy Commander of the Estonian Defence Forces, said the document lays the groundwork for practical cooperation in command and control, unmanned systems, and adaptive decision support — while guaranteeing that each nation retains full sovereignty over its own data and technology.

Collaboration will be built on an open, modular architecture, enabling different countries' systems to interoperate without locking procurement agencies to a single vendor. Initial focus areas are adaptive and learning AI, C2 decision support, and autonomous unmanned systems, with pilot projects planned before broader rollout.

Both militaries intend to advance the partnership in phases, first identifying pilot initiatives before assessing expansion. The long-term ambition is to bring in additional national AI organisations, centres of excellence, and industry partners to seed a wider European defence AI ecosystem.

Why Unmanned Systems Are at the Core

NestAI's flagship product — the adaptive operating system NestOS — has already moved into aviation applications. In May 2026, the Espoo-based company reached an agreement with Finnish defence company Patria to integrate NestOS into Patria's unmanned aerial systems, adding adaptive autonomy to active aerial platforms.

NestAI secured €100 million in investment from Nokia and Finnish state fund Tesi in late 2025. The company's founder, Peter Sarlin, previously founded Finnish AI firm Silo AI before selling it to AMD. Sarlin said the Finland–Estonia collaboration is designed to ensure that the pace and direction of capability development remain "in the hands of the nations operating the systems."

These priorities align closely with mounting airspace pressures across the region.

Baltic states have continued to record drone incursions linked to the war in Ukraine and Russian electronic warfare operations, prompting their presidents to urge NATO to upgrade its rotational Baltic Air Policing mission into a full air defence mission with dedicated counter-drone capabilities. Estonia has already redirected its original €500 million armoured vehicle budget toward counter-drone systems, air defence, and drone capability development.

Finland has also experienced drone spillover incidents and hosted live-fire industry tests of counter-drone systems during air defence exercises in November 2025.

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