Beyond Liability: The Case For Digital Personhood Of AI Vessels In Maritime Law And Sustainability Governance
- IJLLR Journal
- Nov 12, 2025
- 2 min read
Sruthy Sunil Kumar, School of Legal Studies, CUSAT
Hana Fathima V S, School of Legal Studies, CUSAT
ABSTRACT
The emergence of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) poses challenges to the cornerstones of international maritime law, especially in apportioning liability and guaranteeing compliance with sustainability requirements. Current regimes under UNCLOS, SOLAS, COLREGS, and MARPOL assume human agents like owners, operators, or master leaving accountability gaps when decision-making devolves into autonomous artificial intelligence (AI). This investigation explores whether vessels operating through AI ought to be endowed with a semblance of digital personhood, a legal entity that grants limited rights and obligations as an innovative solution to fill such gaps.
The article uses doctrinal and comparative legal analysis, invoking admiralty law's acknowledgment of ships as quasi-persons in in rem actions, corporate personhood regimes, and EU discourses of electronic legal persons. It addresses four core questions: whether the ship-as-person model applies to MASS; whether digital personhood can advance enforcement of IMO's 2023 GHG Strategy, MARPOL Annex VI, and regional carbon markets; whether for charterparties, marine policy, arbitration, and port state control the changes are significant; and whether risks of not awarding AI ships any personality except as mere owner utilities are incurred.
Focusing on international, European, and selected Indian regimes, and limiting its purview to legal analysis bereft of empirical modeling, the value addition of the research is to conceptualize digital personhood as the tool for integrating sustainability governance into admiralty law. The paper concludes by proposing step-wise reforms, including recognizing AI subjects in the context of admiralty arrest, adapting port state control inspections for algorithmic accountability, and integrating AI compliance obligations into International Maritime Organization documents.
Keywords: Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS); Digital Personhood; Admiralty Law; Sustainability Governance; International Maritime Law; Port State Control; International Maritime Organization (IMO).
