The Latest from AI at Sea

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

Weekly roundup: three separate bodies certified maritime AI software in six days and every one of them stopped short of the number that matters, with Korean Register reviewing ShipWatch's calculation method but not its fuel-saving claims, Normec Verifavia certifying 90POE across six emissions regimes while leaving data quality with the owner, and Bureau Veritas approving Inmarsat's NexusWave for cyber; CMA CGM's head of ship management describes taking Orca AI watchkeeping from trial to 100 ships at Seaspan and reveals the data changed conversations with pilots, not just captains; Nauticus sells ROV autonomy as a retrofit that keeps the pilot in charge and claims over 20% efficiency; Sea puts BIMCO's standard clauses inside the fixture workflow; Hanwha Ocean pays MaumAI KRW2.1bn for autonomous welding; the Cannes navigation prize goes to assisted position-keeping rather than AI perception; South Korea forms a taskforce to write its autonomy technology into the international rulebook; and the people building the AI models publicly asked their own industry to slow down, in the same week shipping certified three speedometers

Weekly roundup: CMA CGM starts designing an AI-assisted containership with SDARI and Bureau Veritas and puts the real question in writing, which is how much control stays with the crew; ShipIn's chief executive answers a serving master mariner in print and publishes fleet numbers for the first time, then converts the company to a Public Benefit Corporation with a legal duty to report; Marcura launches a procure-to-pay platform where AI reads the invoice and matches it against the order; Fugro builds an AI marine survey hub in Singapore with government money and claims some analysis runs up to ten times faster; Kaleris buys Newport Systems to automate container repair approvals across 25 data links built over twenty years; GTT Marine turns the voyage data recorder from accident evidence into a weekly bridge monitor; Cydome ships a tool for tracking your suppliers' cyber certificates under IACS UR E27; and we count what shipping actually launched at SMM Hamburg and find plenty of products, almost no published results, and one question nobody wants to answer about who is paying for the AI accounts already in use

Weekly roundup: a serving Maersk master mariner argues in print that AI cameras detect behaviour but cannot measure safety culture, invoking Goodhart's law against a category now running on more than 1,300 vessels without published incident-reduction data; ClassNK puts a natural-language assistant called Survey Compass over its own survey rules and becomes the user of AI rather than the auditor of it; Anschütz integrates SEA.AI machine vision into its AUTONOMICS suite and adds AUTONOMICS CGA, which calculates COLREG-compliant avoidance trajectories and hands heading-only manoeuvres straight to the autopilot; DBMatic and Weforsea Shipping merge into MariControl in Urk to sell hardware, connectivity, software and AI as one stack across shipping, offshore, inland and fishing; Østensjø Rederi expands Dipai's fleet platform across its offshore vessels and tugs five months after onboarding the first ship; Hexagon buys Guidance Marine and its roughly €22m of relative-positioning sensor revenue into the NovAtel division; ESVAGT fits NextOcean's WavePredictor to an SOV at Dudgeon so the officer can see what the vessel will do in the next few minutes before making a transfer call; and we argue the eyes got installed this week while nobody agreed what they are for — the signal is whose decision the sensor changes, the officer's or the office's

Weekly roundup: Evergreen, Samsung Heavy Industries and Weathernews sign an AI voyage optimisation trial in which ClassNK independently verifies the methodology and issues a Statement of Fact on the results, which is the first time a class society has been asked to audit the measurement rather than the software; MACN turns 70,000 corruption reports from 1,350 ports into a live platform that pushes port-specific risk alerts to vessels over low bandwidth before arrival, with TORM exploring API integration; Japan Marine United fits its JAVC-C autonomous navigation system to NS United's 21,000 dwt limestone carrier Kimitetsu Maru in December, running steering, speed and collision avoidance under the supervision of a single crew member; MPA Singapore switches on an integrated port command centre, signs an autonomy MoU with Ocean Infinity and opens a confidential CHIRP-style near-miss reporting line for seafarers; the Global Ro-Ro Community establishes a council to govern verified vessel-level emissions data covering roughly 80% of global car carrier capacity with ClassNK as verifier; X-Press Feeders joins Portchain Connect and its 200-terminal berth planning network; and we argue that class quietly became the auditor of AI claims this week — the signal is that verification is separating from the product

Weekly roundup: BetterSea ships an AI compliance agent that prices FuelEU and ETS exposure, sources quotes and then stops short of executing, and states plainly that customer data is not used to train its models; Stealth Maritime takes ShipIn's FleetVision from a 12-vessel pilot to more than 50 tankers and gas carriers after asking its officers first and getting 85% agreement; ClassNK puts its Innovation Endorsement on an AI COLREG training platform and publishes exactly which five capabilities it certified; Lloyd's Register issues the industry's first guidance letting shipyards submit intelligent 3D models instead of 2D plans for structural approval; Stolt Tankers retires its in-house procurement system and moves roughly 100 deep-sea vessels onto Procureship; and we publish the ten questions we think belong in every maritime AI contract, because this was the week the industry started writing down what good looks like — the signal is that the guardrails are becoming the product

Weekly roundup: BIMCO surveys its own Documentary Committee and finds 20% already drafting contracts with AI, 70% expecting it within five years and a quarter already receiving AI-written clauses — then warns that the wording may not reflect the bargain, and ships a tool to verify contracts are genuine; a review of 28 studies concludes machine learning sharpens freight forecasting but cannot touch shocks and may amplify herd behaviour, with SSY's Roar Adland arguing LLMs add little to decade-old models; ShipIn raises $52m on 1,300 vessels and 92 owners; PIL builds a real-time process twin with Celonis and WNS across 90 countries because enterprise AI needs operational context first; ADNOC and SLB run an AI operations platform across 120-plus rigs and report engineering effort down 30–40%; PTC and Jebsen PTC pilot bigyellowfish health analytics across Filipino crews; OceanPal sells its last three ships and becomes an AI company; and we ask the question the adoption statistics skip entirely — whether your company buys AI tools for your staff or leaves them to buy their own, and whose data goes with them

Weekly roundup: Korea breaks ground on its first Physical AI port at Gwangyang — ₩772.4bn, four berths, agentic AI running the yard from 2029 — while HD Hyundai agrees to export smart-shipyard know-how to Wisconsin; Bureau Veritas grants class approval in principle to a 30 MW floating data centre from Seatrium, putting AI compute on a barge; RightShip and NorthStandard start sharing vessel inspection reports so crews stop being surveyed twice for the same thing; DNV opens AI courses for maritime professionals and names data quality, governance and scaling as the real blockers; the Nautical Institute and Lloyd's Register Foundation finally ask seafarers what all this technology is doing to their work; CyberLogitec wins the TOS and digital twin for the Mediterranean's first semi-automated terminal; OCIMF publishes the first operating guidance for assisted-steering systems ahead of 2028 legislation; and Dualog rebuilds ship–shore messaging around individual crew identities — the week's signal is that shipping has stopped announcing AI and started building the scaffolding around it