Drone manufacturer DJI filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense on Friday over its inclusion on a list of “Chinese military enterprises.”
A DJI spokesperson said the company filed the lawsuit after “attempting to cooperate with the DoD for more than 16 months” and deciding it had “no alternative but to seek relief in federal court.”
“DJI is not owned or controlled by the Chinese military, and the Department of Defense itself acknowledges that DJI makes consumer and commercial drones, not military drones,” the spokesperson said.
The Chinese company was added to the DoD list in 2022, following similar actions by other government agencies. In 2020, DJI was placed on the Commerce Department’s Entity List and the Treasury Department’s list, essentially blocking sales to U.S. companies. DJI was placed on an investment blacklist the following year due to allegations that it was involved in surveillance of Uyghur Muslims. (The company said it had “nothing to do with the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang.”)
In the lawsuit, DJI said that as a result of the listing, it “suffered lasting financial and reputational harm, including loss of business, and its employees were stigmatized and harassed.”
The company claims that the DoD report justifying the listing “contains distracting claims that are completely inadequate to support DJI’s designation.”
“Among numerous deficiencies, the report applies incorrect legal standards, confuses individuals with common Chinese names, and relies on trite facts and weakened connections that fall short of establishing that DJI is a (Chinese military company),” the lawsuit alleges. . It also said that founder and CEO Frank Wang and three early-stage investors “together hold 99% of the company’s voting rights and approximately 87.4% of its shares.”
The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
