DJI

DJI (Da-Jiang Innovations) manufactures roughly 70% of the world's commercial drones from its headquarters in Shenzhen. Its Phantom, Mavic, and Matrice lines dominate consumer, prosumer, and enterprise markets across agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and filmmaking.

Washington has progressively squeezed DJI out of the US market through three interlocking mechanisms. The FCC added DJI to its Covered List in December 2025, blocking new product certifications . FAR clause 52.240-1, active from March 2026, converted that ban into a binding procurement rule requiring federal contractors to certify their supply chains contain no ASDA-covered components . On 3 April 2026, the Pentagon filed a classified brief against DJI, the third layer: sealed national security arguments that DJI cannot publicly contest .

On 22 April 2026 DJI filed its opposition brief in the Ninth Circuit (Case 26-1029), quantifying the regulatory impact at $1.56 billion: roughly $700 million in stalled authorisations for 14 existing products and $860 million from 25 new products it cannot launch in 2026 . The brief, signed by former FCC enforcement chief Travis LeBlanc and former US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, invokes the Ralls Corp. v. CFIUS precedent to argue that national security review cannot rest on opaque, category-wide assumptions without access to the unclassified record. That same Ralls Corp. argument is now being advanced by Autel Robotics in its parallel FCC petition filed 19 May 2026, effectively creating a shared legal framework against the Covered List .

Despite the US restrictions, DJI holds 26 of 66 approved drone systems on the EASA list in Europe (39%). A Drone Security Package targeted for Q3 2026 and a proposed Remote ID threshold drop from 250g to 100g could tighten European market access further.