Drone-maker DJI filed a lawsuit Friday in opposition to the US Division of Protection over its inclusion on a DoD checklist of “Chinese language army corporations.”
A DJI spokesperson mentioned the corporate filed the swimsuit after “trying to have interaction with the DoD for greater than sixteen months” and deciding “it had no different aside from to hunt aid in federal courtroom.”
“DJI is just not owned or managed by the Chinese language army, and the DoD itself acknowledges that DJI makes client and industrial drones, not army drones,” the spokesperson mentioned.
The Chinese language firm was added to the DoD’s checklist in 2022, following comparable actions from different authorities businesses — in 2020, DJI was positioned on Division of Commerce’s Entity Checklist that primarily blocked US corporations from promoting to it, and it was positioned on the Treasury Division’s funding blocklist the next 12 months, as a consequence of DJI’s alleged involvement within the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims. (The corporate mentioned it had “nothing to do with remedy of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.”)
In its lawsuit, DJI says that on account of the itemizing, it has “suffered ongoing monetary and reputational hurt, together with misplaced enterprise, and workers have been stigmatized and harassed.”
The corporate claims that the DoD report justifying the itemizing “incorporates a scattershot set of claims which can be 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 widespread Chinese language names, and depends on stale details and attenuated connections that fall wanting 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.