Drone-maker DJI filed a lawsuit Friday towards the US Department of Defense over its inclusion on a DoD record of “Chinese military companies.”
A DJI spokesperson mentioned the corporate filed the go well with after “attempting to engage with the DoD for more than sixteen months” and deciding “it had no alternative other than to seek relief in federal court.”
“DJI is not owned or controlled by the Chinese military, and the DoD itself acknowledges that DJI makes consumer and commercial drones, not military drones,” the spokesperson mentioned.
The Chinese firm was added to the DoD’s record in 2022, following related actions from different authorities businesses — in 2020, DJI was positioned on Department of Commerce’s Entity List that basically blocked US corporations from promoting to it, and it was positioned on the Treasury Department’s funding blocklist the next yr, resulting from DJI’s alleged involvement within the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims. (The firm mentioned it had “nothing to do with treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.”)
In its lawsuit, DJI says that because of the itemizing, it has “suffered ongoing financial and reputational harm, including lost business, and employees have been stigmatized and harassed.”
The firm claims that the DoD report justifying the itemizing “contains a scattershot set of claims that are wholly inadequate to support DJI’s designation.”
The lawsuit argues, “Among numerous deficiencies, the Report applies the wrong legal standard, confuses individuals with common Chinese names, and relies on stale facts and attenuated connections that fall short of establishing that DJI is [a Chinese military company].” It additionally says that founder and CEO Frank Wang and three early-stage buyers “together hold 99% of the company’s voting rights and approximately 87.4% of its shares.”
The Department of Defense didn’t instantly reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
