On 14 April 2026 Auterion stated that Germany had signed a cooperation agreement with Ukraine enabling the Auterion Airlogix Joint Venture GmbH to execute its first production contract for thousands of AI-guided autonomous strike systems, manufactured in Germany for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, with Auterion contributing AuterionOS, AI-guided terminal navigation, GNSS-denied autonomy and swarm coordination through Nemyx. On the same day the German and Ukrainian governments issued a declaration on a strategic partnership that provides for drone co-production ventures enhanced by data cooperation. Neither document discloses how the software rights in those systems are allocated. That allocation matters because a military customer can retain the physical platform after delivery while lacking, or never having acquired, some of the legal and practical means needed to keep its software-dependent functions available. Continued operation, error correction, functional modification, access to source code, use of interfaces, transfer of data, engagement of another maintainer and migration to another service are separate faculties, and they may attach to different components of the same system and to different entities in its industrial chain. The question for European defence is therefore narrower than whether software is open or proprietary: it is which rights remain exercisable when the original supplier, service or commercial relationship changes, and whether those rights reach the particular layer that has to be maintained.