United States communications regulator blocks new DJI drones, but existing fleet can still fly

The FCC says foreign-made drones are a national security risk. It has done nothing about the ones already in the air.

That contradiction is the story. The Federal Communications Commission added DJI to its Covered List on December 22, 2025, barring new FCC authorizations for the company's products and effectively blocking them from being marketed or imported into the United States. Americans watched DJI announce its newest consumer drones, the Lito X1 and Lito 1, on Thursday. They cannot buy either one. DJI says this will cost it $1.56 billion in lost revenue in 2026 alone, according to the company's April 15 opposition brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. That number breaks down as $700 million from 14 existing products whose FCC authorizations were voided in the December decision, and $860 million from 25 new products the company planned to bring to the U.S. market this year.

The national security case against DJI exists. It is just impossible to evaluate from the outside. The Pentagon filed a memorandum in early April opposing DJI's petition for reconsideration at the FCC, citing classified intelligence and submitting a classified annex to Congress as recently as April 3, 2026. The public version of the memo says the determination relied on both classified and unclassified intelligence. What the classified portion says, nobody outside the government can tell you.

What we do know is the scale of what the government is simultaneously calling dangerous and choosing not to address. New FAA-funded research, published in March by the agency's Center of Excellence for UAS Research, found that DJI-manufactured drones account for more than 96% of drone operations in the U.S. National Airspace System. DJI holds roughly 80% of the U.S. consumer drone market. More than 80% of the nation's 1,800 state and local law enforcement and emergency response agencies that operate drone programs use DJI technology, according to figures DJI provided to Reuters at the time of the December announcement. A Pilot Institute survey of more than 8,000 drone operators found that 43.4% said losing access to new DJI products would have a potentially business-ending impact on their operations.

If those drones are a security threat, the logical response is not obvious from the policy. The FCC's own fact sheet on the Covered List decision is explicit: it does not affect the ability to keep using drones purchased before the December 22 announcement. The existing fleet is grandfathered. The new sales are not.

DJI's legal argument is direct. The company told the Ninth Circuit that the FCC has never identified a specific threat associated with its products, that DJI was denied any opportunity to respond before the determination was made, and that the action caused immediate and grave harm the moment it was announced. DJI requested a six-month hold on the case while the FCC considers its administrative petition, and warned that allowing the FCC to avoid judicial review while the ban continues in force would set a dangerous precedent in which regulators could restrict products indefinitely without accountability. The numbers DJI filed with the court add specificity: 14 existing products lost their FCC authorization under the December decision; 25 planned products are blocked from the U.S. market in 2026.

The court timeline is not on anyone's side. The Ninth Circuit is not expected to rule before late 2026 at the earliest, and a final resolution could take years. In the meantime, the domestic alternatives have not arrived at scale. Skydio, Parrot, and Teal are real companies making real drones, but none has yet matched DJI's price-to-capability curve or its distribution depth. The FCC's limited exemptions for certain foreign-made drones are temporary, expiring at the end of 2026 or early 2027, and apply to non-Chinese manufacturers.

The real question the contradiction surfaces is what the ban is actually for. If DJI drones are dangerous enough to bar from American store shelves, why are millions of the same drones still flying over American farms, construction sites, and emergency response scenes? If they are not dangerous enough to address, what is the national security case for blocking new ones?

The government's answer, insofar as it exists, is sealed. The FAA says the drones already in use can keep flying. That position is either a sensible transition policy or a quiet admission that the threat, whatever it is, was never urgent enough to require the government to actually do anything about it.

For the operators running the 96% of U.S. drone operations that run on DJI platforms, this is not a philosophical question. It is a procurement and planning problem with real constraints and no clean answer.