Drone-maker DJI filed a lawsuit Friday in opposition to the US Division of Protection over its inclusion on a DoD record of “Chinese language navy firms.”
A DJI spokesperson stated 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 different aside from to hunt aid in federal courtroom.”
“DJI will not be owned or managed by the Chinese language navy, and the DoD itself acknowledges that DJI makes client and business drones, not navy drones,” the spokesperson stated.
The Chinese language firm was added to the DoD’s record in 2022, following related actions from different authorities businesses — in 2020, DJI was positioned on Division of Commerce’s Entity Record that primarily blocked US firms from promoting to it, and it was positioned on the Treasury Division’s funding blocklist the next 12 months, resulting from DJI’s alleged involvement within the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims. (The corporate stated 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 “comprises a scattershot set of claims which might be wholly insufficient to assist DJI’s designation.”
The lawsuit argues, “Amongst quite a few deficiencies, the Report applies the mistaken authorized commonplace, confuses people with frequent Chinese language names, and depends on stale details 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 traders “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.
