On 22 May 2026 the Maritime Safety Committee of the International Maritime Organization adopted, by resolution MSC.595(111), the first international Code of safety for maritime autonomous surface ships. In force since 1 July 2026, that text secures the authorisation to operate; it does not secure liability. A vessel certified compliant remains fully bound by SOLAS, the COLREGs, the ISM Code and the Maritime Labour Convention as they currently stand, and it is on that basis that it will be judged. The instruments are old; the litigation is not. Six points determine who answers, and under which regime, when an autonomous or remotely operated vessel causes damage.
1. A voluntary framework, which amends no convention
The product of eight years of work begun by the regulatory scoping exercise of 2017, the MASS Code covers only cargo ships falling under SOLAS chapter I: warships, fishing vessels, pleasure yachts, cargo ships under 500 gross tonnage and, for the time being, passenger ships are excluded. It applies by function rather than by the status of the vessel, so a conventional ship whose anti-collision lookout is moved ashore falls within it for that function, even with a crew on board.
Two obligations structure the text: the software must remain transparent and explainable throughout its operational life (II/10.4), and the autonomous systems must be capable of being overridden by a mechanism that is simple, independent of the system controlled and immediately available (III/16.5). A breakdown alone is never an excuse. The Code derogates from nothing: any dispensation goes through the exemption of SOLAS I/4 or the equivalence of SOLAS I/5, and it addresses safety, not civil liability.
2. The remote master: authority maintained, but weakened
Chapter II/8 of the Code lays down a cardinal principle: a human master must remain responsible for the vessel, with the means to intervene when necessary (II/8.7.3), without his presence on board being required where there is no crew. That choice answers a direct treaty constraint: Article 94(4)(b) of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea requires that each ship be in the charge of a master and officers who possess appropriate qualifications. The certificate is not enough; fitness for the post counts.
But section 5.2 of the ISM Code, which requires the master to have overriding authority in matters of safety, draws its effectiveness from the master’s physical isolation, alone on board and alone exposed, a protection born of the loss of the Herald of Free Enterprise. Ashore, the operator-master is a subordinate employee, instantly replaceable if he refuses to carry out a commercial instruction: the clause may be formally reproduced and practically hollowed out. Whether the overriding authority survives the move ashore is the central question of the whole subject.
3. SOLAS and the COLREGs: obstacles the MASS Code does not remove
Several SOLAS rules sit badly with unmanned operation: regulation V/14 requires a ship to be sufficiently and efficiently manned, regulation V/24 requires immediate reversion to manual steering in hazardous areas, and regulation V/33 assumes the recovery of persons in distress, which is materially impossible without a crew or launching means. Without human hands, the obligation becomes a fiction.
The COLREGs of 1972 have received no amendment at all: rule 5 requires a lookout by sight and hearing as well as by all available means, hearing having its own function in detecting a fog signal no radar picks up; and rule 7 provides that if there is any doubt as to whether a risk of collision exists, such risk shall be deemed to exist, which a system optimising its route may disregard. In Evergreen Marine (UK) Ltd v Nautical Challenge Ltd, the Ever Smart case ([2021] UKSC 6), the United Kingdom Supreme Court clarified the conditions in which the crossing rules apply, and that framework will continue to apply to autonomous vessels without any textual adaptation having been undertaken by the IMO navigation sub-committee.
4. Collision, limitation and cargo: nautical fault gives way to unseaworthiness
The Brussels Convention of 1910 on collision adapts well to autonomy, because it channels liability onto the vessel rather than onto the seafarer. The London Convention of 1976 on limitation opens the benefit of limitation to an operator integrated into the shipowner, but leaves an independent third-party operating centre in a zone of uncertainty that generates an insurance gap; loss of the right to limit requires a personal act close to the criminal standard, as the English courts held in Atlantik Confidence ([2016] EWHC 2412 (Admlty)). English case law has fixed the threshold; French statute has not.
The most concrete risk concerns cargo. The nautical fault exception of Article 4(2)(a) of the Hague-Visby Rules, reproduced in Article L. 5422-12 of the Transport Code, collapses in full autonomy for want of a servant to whom the fault can be attributed. What remains is the carrier’s obligation to exercise due diligence to make the ship seaworthy, which is non-delegable: defective software, or a patch that was never deployed, can now found unseaworthiness against the carrier. Since 9 December 2026, Directive (EU) 2024/2853 on liability for defective products expressly includes software within the notion of a product, but excludes damage to property used for professional purposes, so the shipowner cannot invoke it against the supplier for his own vessel. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 on artificial intelligence, for its part, very probably does not classify autonomous navigation among the high-risk systems of its Annex III, leaving a regulatory gap that only the contract can fill.
5. The remote operator: neither seafarer nor settled status, except in France
Under the Maritime Labour Convention of 2006, the operator in a shore-based centre is not a seafarer: his function is never performed on board. The International Group of P&I Clubs confirmed in July 2026 that a remote operating centre is a shore workplace whose personnel are not treated as seafarers, with no maritime employment contract and no financial security against abandonment.
France anticipated the difficulty: the Ordinance of 13 October 2021 inserted into the Transport Code an Article L. 5511-3-1 assimilating to seafarers those persons who navigate an autonomous vessel from shore, a strictly national fiction but a first-rate argument by analogy elsewhere. There remains the decisive contractual question: Article 4 bis(2) of the Hague-Visby Rules extends the carrier’s exonerations only to his servants and agents, to the exclusion of independent contractors. Where the operating centre is not the shipowner’s, only an express Himalaya clause, extended to the bill of lading and to the charterparty, can give it the same protections, a point the AUTOSHIPMAN standard form approved by BIMCO on 9 October 2024 now allows to be secured.
6. Cyber security and insurance: cover is opening, standard policies are not following yet
Resolution MSC.428(98) has integrated cyber risk into the ISM Code since 2021: mismanaging it is a failure of the safety management system, capable of defeating the limitation of liability. A management failure can cost the cap itself. Directive (EU) 2022/2555, known as NIS 2, classifies water transport among the highly critical sectors and targets any remote operating centre directly, but France has still not transposed it, a delay which led the European Commission to bring the matter before the Court of Justice of the Union on 8 July 2026. Regulation (EU) 2024/2847 on cyber resilience applies to autonomous navigation software, which does not appear on its list of exclusions.
On insurance, the notable development is the opening, in July 2026, of the International Group of P&I Clubs’ pooling to autonomous vessels. But the London market cyber exclusions LMA5402 and LMA5403 exclude computer failures and cyberattacks absolutely, whereas every nautical casualty of an autonomous vessel is by construction a computer failure. Merck & Co v ACE American Insurance, decided by the New Jersey appellate court in 2023 for some 1.4 billion dollars before settlement, showed that ambiguity in war clauses no longer protects the insured: a bespoke cyber clause, distinguishing a malicious cyberattack from a failure in normal operation, is now essential.
Taken together, these six points describe a gap that certification does not close. The MASS Code makes the operation lawful; the conventions decide who pays. Between the two, the allocation of liability between shipowner, operating centre, software supplier and insurer is settled by contract, in the management agreement, the bill of lading, the charterparty and the policy, and it is settled before the first voyage rather than after the first casualty.
Operating, financing or insuring an autonomous or remotely operated vessel? The firm maps the exposure across the conventions and drafts the clauses that allocate it.
Further reading: yacht construction and sale, checking that a vessel is unencumbered, the firm’s shipping practice.
Written by Hervé Guyader, avocat at the Paris Bar, doctor of law. This content is general information and is no substitute for advice on your own matter.