Shipping Body Warns On Legal Risks Of AI-Drafted Contract Clauses
The international shipping association BIMCO has warned owners and charterers against over-reliance on artificial intelligence in drafting contractual clauses, saying that convincing-looking machine-generated wording can shift risk unintentionally, omit operational triggers or fail to reflect the commercial bargain the parties actually struck. The warning follows a survey of the association's documentary committee.
The adoption figures explain the timing. Twenty percent of respondents already use such tools for contractual work and 70 percent expect their organisations to adopt them within three to five years, while 25 percent said they had already encountered clauses drafted by machine rather than drawn from established wording. Respondents identified efficiency gains but raised concerns about inaccuracy, over-reliance and the loss of legal and commercial nuance where there is no proper human review.
The specific failure mode the association describes is worth understanding, because it is not the one most people expect. The risk is not that a generated clause reads badly; it is that it reads well. Charterparty wording carries meaning accumulated through decades of litigation, and a clause that looks orthodox while differing from the standard text in a single qualifier can allocate laytime, deviation liability or off-hire in a way neither party intended and neither party notices until a dispute arises.
Established wording works precisely because it is not original. The association's clauses are developed through drafting groups involving owners, charterers, brokers, lawyers and insurance specialists before scrutiny by a documentary committee of more than ninety members, with participation from the protection and indemnity clubs. That process is slow and produces text that reads awkwardly, and both characteristics are features: every phrase has been argued over, and courts have already ruled on what most of them mean.
The practical defences exist but are little used. An authenticity clause published in 2020 requires the party issuing the final execution version to warrant that it rests on a genuine template from an authorised source with amendments clearly visible, and a free verification tool allows a contract document to be checked against the original. Neither is a technical obstacle to anyone who wants to alter a clause; both make undisclosed alteration something a party has to do deliberately rather than by omission. In a market where fixtures are agreed in hours across time zones and recap emails routinely become the contract, that distinction is where the exposure sits.
