Insights
Field notes on the rules moving the market
Plain-English explainers on the regulation, risk and methods shaping maritime analytics — written to be read by an expert and cited by an answer engine.
How AI agents are changing the way we analyze AIS data
AIS analysis is moving from hand-written geofence queries and static dashboards to agentic pipelines that plan a multi-step investigation, call the right tools, and explain the answer. Here is what changes and what stays hard.
From dashboards to investigations: the agentic maritime analyst
What actually changes in a compliance, underwriting or watch-floor analyst's day when an agent handles triage. A walk through the new workflow — alert, investigate, explain — and where the human stays in charge.
Beyond AIS: how agents fuse satellite, weather and registry feeds
AIS is one feed among many. The hard maritime questions need SAR, optical, metocean and registry data fused together — and tool-using agents are what make on-demand, multi-feed fusion practical instead of a data-engineering project.
How IMO CII, EU ETS and FuelEU Maritime interact in 2026
A plain-English guide to the three overlapping shipping emissions regimes hitting fleets in 2026 — what each measures, where they conflict, and how to model total cost.
The maritime AI market in 2026: what's driving the surge
Maritime-tech AI funding hit roughly $1.75B in Q1 2026, up about 192% year on year. Here is what is pulling capital in — regulatory tailwinds, the dark fleet, and dual-use defense demand — and what to check in diligence.
What is the dark fleet — and why it matters in 2026
The shadow fleet has grown to 600–800 tankers, roughly 10–15% of the global tanker fleet. Here is how it operates, why P&I withdrawal became the sharpest enforcement lever, and how exposure is detected.
How to detect a vessel that has turned off its AIS
A technical primer on dark-vessel detection — why AIS gaps happen, how synthetic aperture radar sees hulls that transponders hide, and how detection-to-AIS fusion turns raw imagery into ranked leads.
Anchors in the dark: reading attacks on undersea infrastructure
A string of pipeline and cable failures in the Baltic since 2023 has turned vessel tracking into forensic evidence. AIS tracks, sudden slowdowns and anchor-drag signatures are how investigators reconstruct what a ship did on the seabed.
Going dark: a field guide to how the shadow fleet hides on AIS
Since the 2022 oil price cap, a fleet of hundreds of aging tankers has moved sanctioned crude by manipulating the one system meant to make them visible. A practical taxonomy of the AIS tradecraft — and how it gets caught.
Watching the grain corridor: maritime data and food security
The 2022 Black Sea Grain Initiative moved millions of tonnes of Ukrainian grain through a mined war zone. Vessel tracking was the instrument of trust that made it possible — and the tool that later exposed grain moved in the dark.
The six days that put ship tracking on every screen: the Ever Given
In March 2021 a single grounded container ship blocked the Suez Canal and roughly 12% of global trade. AIS turned an invisible maritime event into a live global spectacle — and a lesson in supply-chain fragility.
Rerouting the world: AIS in the Red Sea crisis
When Houthi attacks closed the Red Sea to much of global shipping from late 2023, vessels rewrote their AIS broadcasts to plead neutrality and carriers diverted around Africa. It was maritime data as a matter of life, cargo and geopolitics.
The 75% that vanished: what satellites found when they stopped trusting AIS
In January 2024 a landmark study mapped two petabytes of satellite radar and found that roughly three-quarters of the world's industrial fishing vessels never appear in public tracking. It is the single clearest proof that AIS alone is not enough.
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