The motion control of ships is the crucial of the transportation industry. The ship is an under‐actuated system with large inertia and nonlinearity, it also will be influenced by various interference during the voyaging. This work proposed a multi‐verse optimizer (MVO) tuned PI‐type active disturbance rejection generalized predictive control (PI‐ADRGPC) method. The PI‐ADRGPC is used to control the ship motion, and the MVO is employed to tune the parameters of PI‐ADRGPC. To verify the performance of the proposed method, a set of simulations with different interference are tested. The results indicate that compared with particle swarm optimization, dragonfly algorithm and moth‐flame optimization, the MVO tuned PI‐ADRGPC has better performance under different interference in the ship motion control. The Monte Carlo test also indicates that the robustness of the system is strong.