A ferry docks, loads its cars, crosses the water, and unloads on the other side, and no one on board touches the controls. A software program decides when to give way to another ship. A hacker in a basement thousands of miles away tries to steer a cargo vessel into a friendly port. The international law of the sea was written for ships with a captain on the bridge and a crew below deck. What happens to it when the ship is run by computers?
In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen speaks with Martin Davies, Director of the Tulane Maritime Law Center and the Niels F. Johnsen Chair in Maritime Law at Tulane Law School, about how remote-controlled and fully autonomous ships are testing centuries-old admiralty rules on collisions, liability, the authority of the master, lookouts, and pilotage.
Remote, Crewless, or Truly Autonomous
Davies explains that "autonomous ships" is a catch-all label that also covers remote-controlled vessels. Much of the technology is already in use. Remotely operated underwater vehicles have worked in offshore oil and gas for years, and the engine rooms of modern ships are usually unmanned and controlled from elsewhere on board. Growing bandwidth now makes control from shore much easier. He separates three things that are often run together: a remotely controlled ship with seafarers on board, a remotely controlled ship with no one on board, and a truly autonomous ship, on which the computer makes every decision. He describes autonomous ferries in Finland and Norway that berth, load, cross, and unload under computer control.
Rules of the Road for an Algorithm
Shipping is governed by a large body of international conventions, most of them developed under the International Maritime Organization (IMO), so that a ship faces the same rules when it leaves one country and arrives in another. Davies points to the international collision regulations as the most prominent problem. They work like rules of the road, setting out who gives way to whom, and those rules can be written into an autonomous ship's software. But the regulations also contain a rule that requires a ship to depart from the rules when that is necessary to avoid a collision. People on a bridge can judge what another ship is actually doing and respond. Programming a computer to know when to abandon the rules, especially when the other vessel is not following them, is much harder.
Who Is to Blame When Software Steers?
When seafarers are on board, Davies says, blame can be apportioned among people in familiar ways. Without them, the question becomes whether the shipowner should be responsible even though it was not at fault for what the computers did, or whether the owner can shift responsibility to the people who wrote the software. He says there is no clear answer. The IMO was then conducting what it called a scoping exercise, reviewing existing conventions to see which needed to change for this technology, but product liability for computer malfunctions was not on its list at all.
Leaner Ships and Lost Jobs
A ship without a crew needs no accommodation space, the part of the vessel where people live, eat, and sleep. Davies explains that removing tons of steel makes the ship lighter and more fuel-efficient, cuts costs, and can speed turnaround because there are no crew changes. He notes how difficult crew changes became during the COVID-19 pandemic, when lockdowns, closed consulates, and visa problems stranded seafarers on board. The cost is human. Automation threatens the jobs of thousands of seafarers, many from developing countries, with the Philippines the largest supplier, followed by countries such as Ukraine, Myanmar, and India. Because the technology is being developed by wealthy nations and the job losses will fall on poorer ones, he sees a north-south dimension to the debate.
Fuel, Emissions, and the Long View
Autonomous vessels are often promoted as cleaner because they burn less fuel. Davies says the shipping industry is further along the path to decarbonization than most people realize. A ship completed today may work for 15 to 20 years, and carbon rules, many of them driven by the IMO, will be much stricter by then. Owners must decide now whether to build a ship that burns oil or one that uses an alternative such as liquefied natural gas. Whatever efficiencies crewed ships achieve, he expects autonomous ships to be more efficient still.
The Pirates of the Future
Cyber crime is already a significant problem for shipping, Davies says, because the more ships rely on computers and wireless communications, the easier they are to hack. He describes a sharp rise in cyberattacks after pandemic shutdowns pushed more inspections and operations in the offshore industry to remote methods. Some remote-controlled and autonomous vessels are being built without controls on board, so that pirates who board them cannot sail them away. He expects the pirates of the future to be hackers who take over a ship's controls and steer it to a port where they can unload the cargo.
Where Is the Master?
The law speaks of the "master," not the captain, and Davies explains that the two are not always the same person. The master is the one with legal authority and responsibility, and a great deal of maritime law is built around that role. If one remote operator controls five ships, is that person the master of all five, or just a helmsperson while corporate managers make the real decisions? He gives the example of the duty to rescue people in distress at sea. The master personally must divert and give aid, even at great cost to the voyage, and with no one on board there may be no one to do it. Whether the law already allows a master who is not physically on the ship is disputed, he says. Some read minimum-crewing rules as never requiring the crew to be on board, and others call that splitting hairs. He adds that most people regard a crewless vessel as still a ship, noting that most traffic on the Mississippi River is unmanned barges. On the duty to keep a proper lookout under Rule 5 of the collision regulations, he explains that courts treat lookout as a system rather than a person, so sensors and cameras may be able to satisfy it.
Pilotage, the Overlooked Obstacle
Davies believes pilotage may be the biggest legal obstacle of all. A maritime pilot does not steer the ship but boards it to advise the master on bringing it into or out of port, drawing on local knowledge. The Panama Canal is an exception, where pilots take control. Pilotage is regulated locally, not internationally. In the United States, apart from the Great Lakes, it is a matter of state law, and Texas alone has six pilotage authorities. Pilotage is compulsory in most ports, and it takes three different pilots to bring a ship from the mouth of the Mississippi to New Orleans. Because pilotage raises revenue and protects local communities, he expects local governments to resist letting ships with no local knowledge on board sail into their ports.
What to Know Now
The international framework has moved since this 2020 conversation. The IMO completed its regulatory scoping exercise in 2021 (MSC.1/Circ.1638), and on May 22, 2026, its Maritime Safety Committee adopted the International Code of Safety for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS Code). The code is non-mandatory, took effect on July 1, 2026, and applies to cargo ships, covering individual remote and autonomous functions even when crew remain on board. It addresses remote operation centres and requires a human master who remains responsible for the ship. The master need not be on board but must be able to intervene. Experience gained under the code will feed into a mandatory version, planned to take effect no earlier than January 1, 2032. The collision regulations themselves have not been amended. Liability for software failures remains largely unresolved, as Davies predicted. In the United States, Congress amended the Limitation of Liability Act in December 2022, renumbering its core provisions as 46 U.S.C. §§ 30521–30530 and removing small passenger vessels from its protection. The U.S. Coast Guard's first mandatory cybersecurity rule for the marine transportation system took effect in July 2025, and in 2026 the IMO approved a road map toward a non-mandatory Maritime Cyber Code. A vote on the IMO's Net-Zero Framework for shipping emissions was postponed in October 2025 and remains pending.
The projects Davies alludes to have advanced unevenly. The autonomous ferry he describes in Finland was Finferries' Falco, which Rolls-Royce demonstrated in December 2018 on a one-off voyage, sailing autonomously one way and under remote control on the return. Norway's electric container ship Yara Birkeland has carried cargo commercially since 2022, but it still sails with a small crew on board. In 2022 the uncrewed Mayflower Autonomous Ship crossed the Atlantic, though it had to be towed for the final miles into Halifax because of U.S. Coast Guard limits on uncrewed vessels near shore. In December 2025, the passenger ferry Olympia Dream Seto, part of Japan's MEGURI2040 program, became the first vessel certified as an "autonomous ship" under Japanese law, and South Korea's law promoting autonomous ships took effect in January 2025. Finnish law has allowed remote pilotage since 2019, but it remains in the trial stage rather than routine use.
