ROBNEWS
FCC opens a narrow door for foreign toy drones and keeps DJI locked out
The exemption covers only sub 150 gram, no camera, no network toy drones capped at 10 minutes of flight, leaving the December 2025 ban on DJI and Autel intact.
The exemption covers only sub 150 gram, no camera, no network toy drones capped at 10 minutes of flight, leaving the December 2025 ban on DJI and Autel intact.
The Federal Communications Commission's June 16 order sounds like good news for anyone who flew a foreign-made drone in 2025. It is not. The exemption is a narrow carve-out for toy-class drones: aircraft under 150 grams, with no camera, no network connection, and no surveillance-grade sensor, restricted to 100 meters of line-of-sight operation and capped at 10 minutes of flight time per battery. Camera-equipped drones from DJI and Autel, the two brands most recreational and commercial pilots actually fly, remain blocked under the FCC's December 2025 foreign-drone authorization ban.
The order, reported by DroneDJ on June 18, effectively undoes part of the December 2025 decision that had stopped new foreign-made drones and their critical components from receiving FCC authorization to enter the US market. The agency did not reopen the door for the broader market. It pried open a sliver for the smallest, simplest, cheapest indoor toys, the kind sold at retail counters next to the RC cars.
The four hard limits on the exemption matter more than the headline. The drone has to weigh under 150 grams at takeoff. It cannot carry a camera. It cannot have active network connectivity, so no Wi-Fi or cellular link back to a phone or controller. It cannot carry a sensor sophisticated enough to do surveillance work. Operations are limited to 100 meters of line-of-sight from the operator, and the battery has to give out in 10 minutes or less. None of that describes a Mavic, an Autel Evo, or any of the commercial mapping and inspection drones that depend on FCC equipment authorization for US sales.
The Pentagon's national security determination underpins the broader December 2025 ban. The military assessed that foreign-made drones, especially those from China, posed security risks through onboard cameras, network links, and persistent sensors. The June 16 order accepts the same logic: an unsophisticated indoor toy that cannot see, cannot phone home, and cannot stay airborne long enough to do useful reconnaissance does not raise the same concerns.
This is not the first time the agency has carved a slice out of its own ban. The DroneDJ reporting lists a growing list of targeted exemptions: Parrot, Wingtra, AeroVironment, Teledyne FLIR, and Neros, among others, have each won case-by-case approval to ship specific models into the US market. The pattern is consistent. The FCC is keeping the foreign-drone crackdown intact in principle while granting surgical, model-specific relief in practice. The June 16 toy exemption is the broadest of those carve-outs so far, but it is also the narrowest in product scope.
For a US drone pilot or buyer, the practical read is straightforward. If you fly a DJI or Autel camera drone, nothing has changed. Those aircraft still cannot receive new FCC equipment authorization, and the December 2025 import block on critical components remains in force. If you fly a commercial inspection or mapping drone from a Chinese manufacturer, nothing has changed. The carve-out that just opened will not help you get a new airframe into the country.
What did change is a thin category: indoor toy drones under 150 grams, sold as gifts or stocking-stuffer novelties, with no camera, no connectivity, and a battery that dies fast enough to keep them in the toy aisle rather than the toolshed. A small set of foreign manufacturers can now seek FCC authorization for those products. US retailers can stock them. Pilots can fly them, within the 100-meter line-of-sight cap.
The next move to watch is whether the FCC continues this pattern of incremental carve-outs, each one a single product tier or a single named manufacturer, or whether it eventually issues a broader reopening that would let camera-equipped foreign drones back into the US market. So far, every exemption has been a model-specific exception, not a policy reversal. The December 2025 ban is still the default. The toy aisle is the only place the wall has come down.