Millions of images taken while playing Pokémon Go are being fed into a new AI model that one intelligence analyst warns could be used for AI-powered weapons.

Pokémon Go developer Niantic is building a "large geospatial" AI model with the goal of giving the AI "spatial intelligence" by using real-world images collected from its games' players, several news outlets reported this week following a post from Niantic itself.

Spatial intelligence is an AI's hypothetical ability to estimate the rest of an image in a 3D environment when given part of it, or to understand how 3D objects look when manipulated or rotated. Currently, as Niantic admits, AIs are terrible at this. They don't actually "know" what the 3D world is or how it works, so it's difficult for AI models to accurately predict what a location might look like from a different angle.

This geospatial model is being trained on "billions of images of the world" tied to specific, precise locations to tackle this problem. This data has, at least in part, been harvested from the 10 million scanned locations from its Pokémon Go players around the world. Niantic says it gets a million "fresh scans" of locations every week with "hundreds" of images each to feed into its geospatial AI model.

It's building off its existing Lightship Visual Positioning System, or VPS, which lets you move virtual items around a capture of the real world on a smartphone in its augmented reality games. Niantic believes its large geospatial model, however, will be able to take things one step further by anticipating what the rest of something might look like based on pre-fed internal "knowledge" of a specific type of building, for example.

While a world covered in AR objects might sound like a cool, Bladerunner-esque future to some, others are already concerned that geo-mapping AI tools could be used by global militaries.

"It's so incredibly 2020s coded that Pokémon Go is being used to build an AI system which will almost inevitably end up being used by automated weapons systems to kill people," tweeted Elise Thomas, OSINT analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue in the UK. PCMag has reached out to Niantic for comment.

Militaries are already using AI for war and intelligence purposes, though, and will likely continue to do so. A web page for the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency calls AI "a revolution in warfare and intelligence creation" and says it's already using and will continue to use AI to provide information "to gain a competitive edge." The Department of Defense has also publicly advocated for military AI use if it's "responsible."

In Ukraine, AI drone fleets are being built as part of its ongoing war with Russia. China has built at least one AI tool for its military, as well, but recently agreed with the US that humans, not AIs, should control nuclear weapons.

When it comes to Pokémon Go, a Belarus military official tried to claim in September that the game is a tool for Western intelligence, presumably because Niantic is based in the US. When the game was first released, US military members were reportedly playing the mobile game on the job enough that one base had to tell its staff to "NOT chase Pokémon into controlled or restricted areas, office buildings, or homes on base."