BIMCO Surveys Its Own Committee and Finds AI Already Writing Shipping's Contracts

On 7 August, BIMCO published the results of a survey of its Documentary Committee — the body that approves the standard forms most of this industry charters on — and the numbers say the transition already happened while everyone was arguing about whether it would. The findings: 20% of respondents already use AI tools for contractual work. 70% expect adoption within three to five years. And a quarter have already encountered clauses drafted by AI rather than established industry wording. That last figure is the one to sit with: it means AI-written terms are already arriving in counterparties' drafts, and the people receiving them are, at least sometimes, able to tell. BIMCO's objection is precise, and it is not the obvious one. The organisation does not argue that AI writes bad English — it argues the opposite, that AI produces convincing contractual language, and that convincing is the problem. The question is whether the wording properly reflects the commercial bargain. BIMCO's specific warnings are that AI-generated clauses can allocate risk unintentionally, omit important operational triggers, or overlook legal and insurance implications when the output is accepted without sufficient scrutiny. Its defence of standard forms is a defence of process rather than prose: BIMCO clauses come out of drafting groups involving shipowners, charterers, brokers, lawyers and insurance specialists, reviewed by a Documentary Committee of more than 90 members. A model can generate language from existing material; it cannot replicate a negotiation between competing interests. The practical output is two things, and one of them is unusually concrete. The Contract Authenticity Clause requires the party issuing the final contract to warrant that it is based on an authentic BIMCO template and that amendments are clearly visible. And BIMCO has released a free SmartCon verification tool that lets you check whether a PDF contract is genuine. Why this matters for ship managers: the risk here is not a hallucinated clause you would catch. It is a fluent, plausible amendment buried in a fixture that shifts an off-hire trigger, a laytime exception or an indemnity two degrees in the counterparty's favour — and reads exactly like every other clause in the document. Fluency has historically been a weak signal of care in contract drafting. It no longer is. What to do now: three things this month. Run the SmartCon check on any contract you did not originate. Write down who in your commercial team is permitted to accept non-standard wording, and require a named human sign-off on any clause that departs from the template. And ask your P&I club and FD&D cover directly how they treat a dispute where the disputed wording was AI-generated — that answer does not exist in most policies yet, and you want to know before you need it. The honest caveat: BIMCO has an institutional interest in the primacy of BIMCO forms, and this survey is of BIMCO's own committee — a self-selecting group of documentary specialists, not a representative sample of the industry. No sample size was published. The direction of travel is credible; treat the precise percentages as indicative rather than measured. [Splash247]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 9 August 2026.