Maritime surveillance has become Southeast Asia’s critical capability gap. Artificial intelligence combined with orbital surveillance technologies – which we call space AI – offers one way to close it.
As China asserts ownership and control of the South China Sea, the challenge for littoral countries is increasingly about information: who can see first, understand what they are seeing, and act first.
Additional patrol ships and aircraft cannot maintain persistent awareness across some of the world’s busiest maritime spaces amid increasingly frequent confrontations involving coast guards, maritime militia and fishing vessels.
The 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration award under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea clarified important legal principles. However, China’s rejection of the decision showed that legal victories mean little without the ability to monitor, document and respond to developments at sea.
By integrating orbital Earth-observation systems and AI-enabled analytics, space AI enables continuous monitoring across areas far beyond the reach of patrol vessels, aircraft and coastal radar. The distinguishing capability is not integration itself but what AI can do at the point of collection. For example, satellites can now use onboard AI to detect ships at sea and transmit only relevant information to the ground. Space AI does not replace navies or coast guards but allows them to deploy limited resources more effectively.
This capability is increasingly necessary. Illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, piracy, smuggling, trafficking and grey-zone coercion routinely occur across overlapping jurisdictions. Additionally, maritime accidents and climate-related disasters demand faster situational awareness and response.
Conventional surveillance cannot keep pace. Patrol vessels can’t see far or move fast, aircraft quickly have to return to base, and coastal radar cannot monitor the vast expanses of the South China Sea or the Sulu and Celebes seas. While coastal radar can cover potential chokepoints such as the Strait of Malacca, the real constraint could still be the sheer volume of data.
Space AI changes that equation by combining synthetic aperture radar, optical imagery, ship transponder messages, detection of radio-frequency signals and weather data into a single picture. AI can rapidly identify suspicious vessel behaviour, detect ships operating with disabled transponders and prioritise anomalies for human operators to attend to. Instead of manually analysing thousands of satellite images, maritime agencies can focus on incidents requiring immediate attention, reducing the time between detection and response.
The technology is particularly relevant for Southeast Asia, which sits astride some of the world’s most important sea lanes: the Strait of Malacca, for example, carries roughly one-third of global trade. Yet many regional countries possess modest naval and coast guard capabilities relative to the maritime areas they must monitor. Indonesia faces the challenge of policing one of the world’s largest archipelagos. Malaysia and the Philippines continue to contend with porous maritime borders in the Sulu and Celebes seas. And across the South China Sea, maritime militia and other grey-zone actors deliberately exploit surveillance gaps while operating below the threshold of armed conflict.
Persistent satellite monitoring supported by AI offers a more cost-effective way for Southeast Asian countries to expand maritime surveillance than attempting to match larger powers ship for ship. The same capabilities also strengthen humanitarian assistance and disaster relief by rapidly assessing storm damage, flooding, oil spills and coastal erosion, allowing governments to respond more effectively.
Yet space AI is also becoming another arena of strategic competition. Maritime power increasingly depends on access not only to ships but also to satellites, cloud computing and AI-enabled geospatial analysis. As China and India expand their space-based maritime capabilities, many Southeast Asian countries remain dependent on commercial providers or external partners for satellite imagery and processing. Nationally owned and operated satellites decrease reliance on commercial providers and foreign-controlled space capabilities. They mitigate single provider risks and insulate maritime surveillance from geopolitical pressures, commercial priorities and technology restrictions that can potentially hamper access to data. More than that, they lay the groundwork for information sharing initiatives independent of extra-regional partners such as the US and the European Union.
Southeast Asia should therefore treat space AI as regional strategic infrastructure rather than simply another defence capability. Existing mechanisms, such as Singapore’s Information Fusion Centre, have already demonstrated the value of multinational information sharing. Integrating AI-enabled satellite analytics into these platforms would strengthen collective maritime surveillance while helping less capable member states avoid duplicating the capital-intensive tasks of developing coastal radar systems, conducting physical patrols, and monitoring AIS transmissions.
Technology alone, however, will not solve the problem. Southeast Asia also needs common approaches to data sharing, cybersecurity, AI audits and the responsible use of AI in maritime operations. Trusted governance will be as important as trusted technology.
The issue is no longer who fields the largest fleet but who can generate the clearest operational picture the fastest. For Southeast Asia, preserving a stable and rules-based maritime order will depend on how effectively the region connects satellites, artificial intelligence and regional cooperation into a shared maritime awareness network.
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