AiatSea: The Records That "Cannot Lie" Just Put Four Tankers in Lima

In 2019 the Nautical Institute published the second volume of its Guidelines for Collecting Maritime Evidence, about electronic evidence from ECDIS, VDR and AIS. It carried the view of an Admiralty judge, Mr Justice Teare, that "electronic or digital records cannot lie". Unlike a witness, they have no faulty memory, so they are the best evidence of what happened.

He was right about memory. A voyage data recorder does not forget, and it does not protect its own career. But this week showed the other half. A record can store a lie perfectly. The four tankers in story 2 did not forget where they were. Their receivers were fed a false position, and the equipment recorded it faithfully. The record did not lie. It was lied to.

The book is being rewritten. This week the NI announced a second edition of that volume. It now covers electronic records, artificial intelligence and digital reconstruction in accident investigations, and it says material produced or supported by AI must be checked, not accepted without professional scrutiny. Its technical editor, Simon Daniels, said ships now produce a huge amount of digital information, but more data does not automatically make an incident easier to understand. You need to know where the evidence is, act fast to preserve it, and understand the limits of the system that produced it. The foreword is by the head of loss prevention at Gard.

And an insurer is paying attention. Also this week, P&I club NorthStandard added PntGuard from SGM Technology to its GetSET! list of safety technology, with a 15% discount for members. The system compares the ship's satellite position with an authenticated signal from the Iridium satellite network, using equipment from NAL Technologies, and sounds visual and audible alarms when the two disagree. It was developed together with the shipowner Tschudi Shipping. Last week we asked whether the bridge would ever show the crew when a position is false. Here is one answer that exists today, before Galileo's protected signal arrives in 2027. Two honest notes. It is a discount, not funding, and NorthStandard has fully funded an AI safety pilot before, so this is a smaller step. And no performance data was published.

Why this matters for AI. AI tools run on records. Voyage optimisation, emissions reports, AI-written incident summaries and digital reconstructions of an accident all start from the data the ship recorded. If the record was fed a lie, the AI repeats it with confidence. And if the data pipeline cleans away the "impossible" points, both the AI and the investigator lose the only sign that something was wrong.

Three things to change this week. First, tell your data providers and your own IT team: flag impossible positions, never delete them. Second, on ships trading in known interference areas, have a second position source, and record which source the officer trusted and why. Third, add one line to the incident procedure in your safety management system: any AI-made summary or reconstruction must be marked as AI and checked against the raw record before it goes into a report. None of this needs a new budget. It needs a decision.

Disclosure: this newsletter is produced with the help of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. The Nautical Institute's rule applies to us too, so we check what it writes against the sources before we publish. [Smart Maritime Network · Nautical Institute · Nautical Institute · first edition · Splash247 · NorthStandard · Smart Maritime Network · PntGuard]

This story is part of the Maritime AI Digest of 27 September 2026.