Drone-maker DJI filed a lawsuit Friday in opposition to the US Division of Protection over its inclusion on a DoD listing of “Chinese language navy corporations.”
A DJI spokesperson mentioned the corporate filed the go well with after “trying to have interaction with the DoD for greater than sixteen months” and deciding “it had no various aside from to hunt aid in federal court docket.”
“DJI just isn’t owned or managed by the Chinese language navy, and the DoD itself acknowledges that DJI makes shopper and business drones, not navy drones,” the spokesperson mentioned.
The Chinese language firm was added to the DoD’s listing in 2022, following comparable actions from different authorities companies — in 2020, DJI was positioned on Division of Commerce’s Entity Listing that basically blocked US corporations from promoting to it, and it was positioned on the Treasury Division’s funding blocklist the next yr, as a result of DJI’s alleged involvement within the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims. (The corporate mentioned it had “nothing to do with therapy of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.”)
In its lawsuit, DJI says that because of the itemizing, it has “suffered ongoing monetary and reputational hurt, together with misplaced enterprise, and staff have been stigmatized and harassed.”
The corporate claims that the DoD report justifying the itemizing “accommodates a scattershot set of claims which are wholly insufficient to assist DJI’s designation.”
The lawsuit argues, “Amongst quite a few deficiencies, the Report applies the fallacious authorized customary, confuses people with frequent Chinese language names, and depends on stale information and attenuated connections that fall in need of establishing that DJI is [a Chinese military company].” It additionally says that founder and CEO Frank Wang and three early-stage buyers “collectively maintain 99% of the corporate’s voting rights and roughly 87.4% of its shares.”
The Division of Protection didn’t instantly reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
