NATO has developed a new tool to help allies detect suspicious shipping vessel activity and protect undersea cables and pipelines from potential sabotage. Known as “Mainsail”, the AI software tool flags vessels behaving suspiciously.

The NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) developed the tool. The CMRE is situated in La Spezia, Italy, and is a world-class NATO scientific research facility with over sixty years of expertise.

Artificial intelligence (AI) analyses maritime traffic, allowing authorities to spot vessels that appear to be diverting off-course to potentially damage or gather intelligence about undersea infrastructure.

‘It is able to, in an automatic way, without the use and presence of operators, raise suspicion on particular trajectories of ships,’ explains CMRE Director Dr Eric Pouliquen. ‘This has been turned into a tool kit that is very user friendly. We anticipate to bring more data that will be fed into the tool kit as we continue to improve it. We are quite optimistic that in the not so distant future, we will be able to have something very robust that can prevent and deter any saboteur.’

Also read: NATO launches mission to protect subsea infrastructure

Damage to cables and pipelines very disruptive

Damage to the pipelines and cables that carry energy and information across the seabed can be very disruptive. In November and December of 2024 alone, three separate cables carrying internet data and power between five NATO Allies – Estonia, Finland, Germany, Lithuania and Sweden – were severely damaged.

Watch a video by NATO on Mainsail below. Footage includes shots of CMRE scientists testing out Mainsail, as well as an interview with CMRE Director Dr Eric Pouliquen.

The picture at the top is a still from the video by NATO below.

Also read: ‘Autonomy is key to secure critical subsea infrastructure’