Autel Robotics filed its Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reply on Tuesday 19 May, arguing the FCC's Covered List designation rests on classified evidence Autel has never seen and on allegations imported from the parallel DJI case1. The company invokes Ralls Corp v Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the 2014 D.C. Circuit ruling that established a Fifth Amendment due-process right to see the evidence underlying a national-security restriction. Autel's reply met the 11 May statutory deadline under FCC notice DA 26-223 and includes the first public sworn declarations on Autel data handling: AES-128 / AES-256 encryption, local storage by default, no third-party access.
The reply tests whether the regulatory stack that has cleared Chinese drone makers from the US federal market can survive a constitutional challenge. The Department of Defense filed a classified intelligence annex against DJI's parallel FCC petition on 3 April; DJI booked $1.56 billion in 2026 regulatory losses in its Ninth Circuit brief on 22 April. If the Ralls Corp argument carries, the FCC may be forced to construct an unclassified evidentiary record, slowing the regulatory exclusion timetable that Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) clause 52.240-1 and the Covered List have built since 22 December 2025.
Autel is the first respondent to attack the procedural foundation rather than the underlying allegations. The Ralls Corp precedent was decided against CFIUS in 2014 after President Obama blocked a Chinese-owned wind farm acquisition without disclosing the intelligence basis; the D.C. Circuit found that targets of national-security restrictions are entitled to see and contest the underlying evidence. Applying that holding to the FCC Covered List would not erase the designation, but it would force the FCC to litigate Autel's exclusion on the evidentiary record rather than on the classified annex DoD has been keeping out of court.
