Green UAS is a U.S. cybersecurity and supply chain certification program for commercial drones that can earn manufacturers an exemption from the FCC Covered List, and Taiwan's new status as its first overseas gatekeeper shows how trusted allies can help close the supply gap left…
The U.S. wants to phase Chinese drones out of its government and critical-infrastructure supply chains, but the domestic industry is not yet large enough to fill the gap. A new arrangement with Taiwan shows how Washington may try to bridge that shortfall, by turning a cybersecurity certification program into a credentialing layer that trusted allied nations can route through.
Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) is now the first overseas organization authorized to run Green UAS assessments on behalf of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the industry's main certifying body. Green UAS started as a cybersecurity verification scheme for commercial drones and has grown into a procurement credential: AUVSI President and CEO Michael Robbins described it at the XPONENTIAL 2026 conference as "a pathway to Blue UAS and today an exemption from the FCC Covered List," the U.S. blacklist of communications equipment deemed a national security risk.
The move gives Taiwanese drone manufacturers a local route to a U.S.-aligned certification that, in turn, can unlock access to federal, state, and public-safety procurement. ITRI's assessments cover the same component-sourcing and cybersecurity standards AUVSI applies in the United States, so passing them in Taipei is meant to count in Washington. DroneLife reported on June 8 that the arrangement "maintains compliance with U.S. cybersecurity and supply chain requirements."
The context for the agreement is the federal Drone Dominance initiative, the Trump administration's push to expand U.S. drone manufacturing capacity. Officials have framed the program as essential to national security, but domestic production is unlikely to meet near-term demand on its own. Robbins characterized Taiwan as offering "speed, scale, resilience and strong leadership" in a June 8 AUVSI column on trusted supply chains, and the source material suggests the partnership is being sold to allied governments as a reusable template rather than a one-off.
That template matters beyond Taipei. AUVSI has signaled that Europe, Japan, and South Korea could pursue similar arrangements, which would let trusted suppliers in those markets access U.S. government and public-safety drone buyers without negotiating a fresh bilateral deal each time. The architecture, in other words, is a credentialing layer designed to scale across allies, not a single procurement exception for one country.
It also carries obvious questions that the source itself flags. Certification run by an overseas assessor on a foreign manufacturer's home turf only works if the cybersecurity and supply-chain bar is the same as the U.S. version, and if audits stay rigorous when the assessor is not on American soil. The arrangement is "not a shortcut," according to the DroneLife reporting, and the credibility of the program will rest on whether that proves true in practice.
Robbins's recent trip to Taiwan underlines the political weight behind the effort. He attended the 2026 National Strategic Summit on Supply Chain Resilience, hosted by the Defense Science, Engineering, and Technology (DSET) initiative, met with Taiwan's National Security Council, and sat down with Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim. He also spoke on a DSET panel on AI supply chain resilience alongside representatives from Boston Dynamics, the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), and Andreessen Horowitz, a lineup that hints at how seriously both governments are treating the policy question.
What to watch next is whether other allies follow Taiwan's lead, and whether the U.S. government treats a foreign-assessed Green UAS certification as functionally equivalent to a domestic one when it writes procurement rules. If the answer to both is yes, the agreement stops being a Taiwan story and becomes the operating manual for how the United States admits trusted drones into its market for the next decade.