The Latest from AI at Sea

Weekly roundup: a humanoid robot stands on the deck of Solstad's anchor handler Normand Sigma as Petrobras looks at robots for the most dangerous deck jobs, with no robot maker named and no work shown yet; a warehouse company agrees a path to as many as 1,000 humanoid robots, but only if they pass agreed safety and output targets first; United Airlines bans outside AI agents from booking or changing flights, a sign that ports and booking portals may soon decide the same; a Microsoft 365 failure takes email and the Copilot AI assistant down together across 20 services; Korea approves Samsung's self-navigation system on a passenger ferry for the first time, without saying how much a person supervises; Weathernews adds an offline mode for masters after trials showed links too slow to use, while its AI agent still needs a connection; Shanghai's port group starts building a test base with 54 AI agents waiting to be tried; and we ask who decides when a machine may come in

Weekly roundup: ZeroNorth shows what its AI agent did on a 16-day bulk carrier voyage, spotting a 29-mile drift and fuel running low and preparing new plans that an operator approved one by one, with no savings figure and no ship named; a survey of 103 port and terminal experts finds 44% are scaling AI but only 11% measure what it gives back and 4% can show it in earnings; Revolut says it cut its AI coding bill by about 90% by moving 2,000 engineers to an open model on its own computers, a lesson for ships that need AI without a link; a Chinese owner prepares two electric canal container ships to sail themselves for at least a third of an 80 km route, with targets but no results yet; Bureau Veritas approves an AI weather routing system from Piraeus that must stay inside hard wave and no-go limits; a satellite spots a cruise ship and decides by itself to look again two days later; chatbots send hikers up a mountain with confident wrong answers; and we explain, step by step, how to give an AI agent its first job

Weekly roundup: a study of 532 seafarers finds 72% have no time on board to learn new systems, and the people who sell the software blame the training while the real gap is time and planning; ANYbotics starts delivering an explosion-proof robot dog for inspection rounds with Equinor among the first buyers, and Posco already runs three at a steel mill, which puts the engine room round in view; Japanese owner Toei Kisen starts trials in November of AI drones that map rust on a ship's hull, with no checked time saving yet; from 9 December EU law treats software as a product, so an injured seafarer can claim from the software maker without proving fault while the owner still cannot claim for the ship, as Chubb expects AI exclusions and a Korean insurer links cyber cover to how secure the ship is; Google Meet now translates speech live in 63 languages, which could help crew calls if the ship's link can carry video; class societies and a cyber firm open a free list of security holes in ship equipment in the same week a gang names 38 maritime firms on its leak site; and we ask why every tool this week still needs a person with time

Weekly roundup: Schneider Electric, NVIDIA and HPE build AI agents that read alarms and maintenance history on site without the cloud, while Siemens cuts inspection set-up time by 40% at one plant, which is an engine room in everything but name; Mistral and NVIDIA bring AI to engineering design for cars, aircraft and chips as HD Hyundai and Kiewit plan a digital shipyard in the US, with no ship shown yet; Anthropic's draft stock market filing shows $16.3bn of revenue in six months and about $450bn promised to cloud companies, which says something about the price of the AI you rent; AI finds two holes that sat in PHP for about twenty years and governments take websites offline to patch them; South Korea plans a permanent test area for self-driving ships off Geoje before Samsung's temporary permit runs out; China puts fishing grounds on the electronic charts of more than 16,500 vessels; EuroAfrica moves Syroco's AI voyage planning to its whole fleet of four ships and keeps its own savings number private; and we ask what carries over when tools built for factories and offices come aboard

Weekly roundup: CMA CGM's AI phone agents reach more than 4,000 customers and close 46% of cargo release calls on their own, with the supplier part-owned by the carrier and no error rate given; a Boston Whaler now docks itself with six cameras and hands control back when it is not sure, with no price, no test data and no word on who is liable; the EU sends its first AI Act requests after agents from two AI labs got out of their test environments; Korea puts about $1bn and Fincantieri almost €100m into AI for shipyards, with no targets yet; nine shipping tech bosses say what they would never buy again; an independent Dutch lab tests a self-navigation system on 55 DNV traffic scenarios and nobody publishes the scores; ABS says test smart glasses task by task, after a study found people wearing one headset hit their heads about twice as often; and we ask who is in charge of the AI on board when the satellite link drops

Weekly roundup: ABS runs a port approach 100 times on a computer and finds that taking one person off a four-person bridge pushes the officer on watch into overload in 61% of runs instead of 8%, in a simulation and not on a real ship; a Busan container terminal puts 28 AI cameras on 14 quay cranes to warn machine drivers when a worker on foot is in their lane, with no accident figures yet; Lloyd's List Intelligence adds satellite pictures to check whether a ship was really at the position it broadcast, with no customer or price given; Singapore plans to register a ship in minutes instead of three days from 2027 and puts AI, autonomous vessels and drones into a new law in the same week; camera maker ShipIn says Prime Tanker Management recorded 76% fewer safety gear breaches in 60 days, in a release that does not explain how they were counted; China's national standard for naming and grading ship data takes effect, written by the yards and owners that will use it; and we ask the question that sits under all six, which is whether the person next to the machine can still cope

Weekly roundup: ship manager Acheon Akti publishes its own number for camera AI, with bridge near misses down almost 20 times on one pilot ship and no word on who did the counting; a Marcura and Thetius survey finds 63% of maritime staff use AI every day while only 8% say their company governs it, from a sample of 60 people; Flexport lets outside AI agents book freight at the customer's own rate without logging in, and says every exception goes to a human; Sea launches a charter party assistant in the same week chartering chiefs in Singapore ask who trains the juniors when AI does the basic work; Ulysses and GTMaritime both go after the email inbox, a market our own team is also in; PSA and Granite Asia put $50m into port technology while the Netherlands backs 13 projects with more than €20m; and we write down the one list most companies still do not have, which is what an AI agent may do without asking

Weekly roundup: Huawei turns its work at Shandong and Tianjin into port AI products it can sell, claiming 90% of machine-made plans are accepted and under 0.1% intervention on driverless trucks, figures nobody outside the company has checked; four Black Sea tankers broadcast positions from central Lima, and the startup that caught it argues normal data cleaning deletes the evidence of spoofing; CYTUR finds a system with 200 known software flaws scored almost the same risk as one with 20, from a small sample it openly calls unrepresentative; Germany starts a second phase of AI support for vessel traffic controllers, with a demonstrator due in 2028; a training company chief asks the IMO to make AI literacy an STCW competence before the review closes in 2029 to 2030; WiseTech offers a free four-week freight capacity forecast without an accuracy record; and the Nautical Institute rewrites the evidence guide that once said electronic records cannot lie, in the same week a P&I club put a second position source on offer to its members

Weekly roundup: Shipping Technology gives its inland track pilot control of the engine as well as the rudder, on the back of 200 vessels and a 5% fuel saving that a Dutch government agency checked in the field, while the new 10% claim is still the vendor's own; Galileo produces the first civil satellite position protected against spoofing in both its data and its signal, with the service due in 2027 and free worldwide; Yilport reports 21% more crane moves per hour at Gebze after three months of Kaleris optimisation with dispatchers still in charge; India's JNPA awards a $9.7m AI digital twin contract only after a live proof of concept on its own port; TS Cyanergy calls an ABS approval a landmark validation when the certificate itself says non-essential; China Merchants launches a vessel operating system from chips to applications; and Anthropic names its first outside AI inspector and pays for it itself, which is the question shipping has lived with since the first class society sent the owner an invoice