The German military is assessing a range of potential AI tools to augment and automate defensive measures in the case of an attack on German soil, according to its cyber chief.

Vice Admiral Thomas Daum, inspector of the Cyber and Information Domain Service, told the daily business newspaper Handelsblatt that the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) will be piloting AI tools for the battlefield from next year.

“The exploration is ongoing, and I'm optimistic that we will have a prototype in the second quarter ​of 2027,” Daum said.

The goal is for the Bundeswehr to be able to autonomously collect live data from a potential battlefield, be it on land, sea, or in the air, and use this to rapidly inform business decision-making.

Handelsblatt reported that BWI GmbH, the IT services arm of the Bundeswehr, is assessing 30 tools. These include one by the French AI firm Chapsvision and MDOCore by the German defence and aerospace firm Hensoldt.

MDOCore is intended to process sensor data from across different weapons and military vehicles and aggregate it automatically. Hensoldt has partnered with the German defence firm Helsing, which processes the aggregated sensor data using its specialised military AI models.

Handelsblatt has previously reported that the Bundeswehr has decided against using Maven, the AI-powered battlefield decision-making tool developed by the US firm Palantir.

This is part of a wider European reconsideration of dependency on US providers as governments seek greater data and AI sovereignty, with UK MPs having questioned government Palantir contracts along the same lines.

The search for multi-domain AI systems comes as Germany is shoring up its defences against potential drone attacks on its soil. Berlin has blamed the attempted drone attack on Leipzig Airport carried out in August on Russia, and NATO has warned that Western Europe faces an increase in “hybrid” warfare combining kinetic and cyber attacks.

Last year general Carsten Breuer, the seniormost person in Bundeswehr, told the BBC that Russia could attack a Nato member by 2029 or even sooner.

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