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 “making an attempt to interact with the DoD for greater than sixteen months” and deciding “it had no different apart from to hunt aid in federal court docket.”
“DJI isn’t owned or managed by the Chinese language navy, and the DoD itself acknowledges that DJI makes client and industrial drones, not navy drones,” the spokesperson mentioned.
The Chinese language firm was added to the DoD’s listing in 2022, following related actions from different authorities businesses — 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 12 months, attributable to 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 because 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 might be wholly insufficient to assist DJI’s designation.”
The lawsuit argues, “Amongst quite a few deficiencies, the Report applies the improper authorized commonplace, 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 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.
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