Year in Review: Skylight Opens to the Public, Introduces Shippy, and Helps Partners Act at Sea
Skylight's 2025-2026 Impact Report looks at a year of wider access, new AI tools, and partners putting the data to work, from June 2025 through May 2026.
The way technology gets built changed dramatically this year, powered by AI, and it changed what was possible for us too.
For the Skylight team, that meant we could raise the bar. We challenged ourselves to do even more, the same way so many of our partners do every day, with limited resources and no shortage of will. Expanding our mission, reaching new use cases, and serving our users better stopped being a plan and started to become real, at a steady pace.
In keeping with what it means to be part of an open research institute, we released a public version of Skylight this year, extending our reach and giving many organizations broader access to data. We also took our first steps toward AI agents, choosing to move as practically and as ethically as possible. Our partners walked this path with us. They trusted us and, just as importantly, pushed us to go further.
This year has been intensely dynamic, and our team grew right along with it: in mission, in reach, and, for several of us, at home. It has also been deeply motivating. The ocean asks for extreme collaboration if we want to deliver real impact, and that collaboration is what fills the pages of this report. The Skylight family, in every sense, keeps expanding, and our commitment keeps growing alongside it.
Thank you to everyone on the frontlines, doing this work under real constraints, who inspire us to keep improving and giving our best.
~ Natalí Giomi, Senior Regional Partnership Manager for Latin America & the Caribbean
What partners did with the data
Reported by partners, June 1, 2025 to May 31, 2026:
21+ vessels interdicted and fines issued
- $915,000+ USD in fines collected
- 6,000+ kg of illegally caught fish seized
- 171 sea turtles protected
Partners also reported 5 search and rescue operations supported, 1 RFMO IUU listing, and 2 formal warnings or compliance notices. The full report has the rest.
Skylight surfaces signals. The inspections, fines, and decisions belong to the agencies that made them.
“Skylight provided data on the proximity of passing ferries to Chumbe Island and its Marine Protected Area. This is of considerable ecological concern, and this data is being used to lobby government to implement legislation that will push the ferries further away.”
-Chumbe Island Coral Park Ltd, Tanzania
What's new this year
Shippy. Shippy is our first AI agent for maritime domain awareness. Ask it for a brief of fishing activity in Fiji's EEZ over the last 24 hours and it returns a structured, cited answer, with every data point linked back to its source. It is in the hands of more than 20 early adopters, including GFW, ProtectedSeas, UNODC, INTERPOL, the UK Marine Management Organisation, and Prefectura Naval Argentina. Learn more about Shippy.
A public version of Skylight. In October 2025 we launched a limited, no-account view of vessel detections, delayed by three days. In the last two months of the reporting period it reached 3,000+ visitors across 146 countries, and many went on to request a full account. Over the year, 111 organizations created their first Skylight account, part of a 42% year-over-year increase in new accounts.
Vessel attribute estimation. A detection says something is there. Estimated length starts to say what: industrial or artisanal, known fleet or not. The feature runs on OlmoEarth, Ai2's open foundation model for Earth observation, released in November 2025. Use of the Estimated Length Filter grew from 70 to 150 times per month at launch to 478 in May, and Sentinel-2 card opens rose 3.5x to 22,900 in April 2026.
What's in My Area, Right Now. Checking a vessel's last known AIS position used to mean leaving Skylight for a separate tracker. Now the answer sits where the investigation already is. Within two months of launch, 431 users across 203 organizations adopted the layer.
Who is using Skylight
The work is getting noticed. The Bangladesh Navy named Skylight one of its core maritime domain awareness systems at the ANU MDA Indian Ocean Conference in Dhaka in November 2025, and UNODC cited Skylight as an expert source in its May 2026 manual on maritime domain awareness and digital evidence.
What's next
We will keep building AI agents beyond Shippy, with the aim of automating more of the investigative work analysts do by hand. We will grow our community of government, NGO, and research partners while deepening the relationships we have. And we will keep releasing the next generation of AI models and features that expand the vessels, activities, and use cases Skylight can support.
Explore the full 2025-2026 Impact Report (PDF)
