As the FBI and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was scrambling to find the pilot whose DJI drone illegally collided with an aircraft battling the devastating Los Angeles fires, the globally dominant Chinese manufacturer of that same drone made a startling announcement this week: It would be turning off controls worldwide, known as geofences, that actively prevented its drones from flying over airports, military bases, and disaster response zones (among other restricted areas).
According to the DJI announcement, the changes would shift restricted zones or no-fly zones in the United States to “enhanced warning zones, aligning with the FAA’s designated areas.” Since 2015, in the wake of an incident where a hapless DJI drone pilot accidentally crashed his aircraft onto the White House lawn, DJI drones had shipped with software that prevented them from taking off in or flying into certain constantly updated restricted areas, including national security locations around Washington, D.C., and over active wildfires and other disasters in temporarily restricted areas. DJI’s most recent update turns that hard geofence feature off, substituting it with a in-app alert that irresponsible pilots can, presumably, simply ignore.
DJI, which dominates the U.S. consumer drone market and sells in more than 100 countries, claims that this move places “control back in the hands of the drone operators, in line with regulatory principles of the operator bearing final responsibility.” Its announcement goes on to point out that global drone regulations have evolved massively since 201, and that in the United States, the newly federally mandated Remote ID solution—a sort of license plate for drones—makes “detection and enforcement [of rogue drones] much easier.”
On the face of it, DJI is making a reasonable move here. But in the U.S. political context, it’s also a potentially politically disastrous one.
DJI is correct that operator responsibility is the overall thrust of U.S. drone regulations. It’s also true that, as the company points out in its announcement, DJI has already removed similar geofences in the United Kingdom and in some other European Union countries in January 2024, citing similar arguments, without significant controversy or incident.
Further, DJI is correct that Remote ID is now both active and federally mandated, as of March 2024, and that U.S. drone laws don’t mandate that drones sold in the United States must be shipped with hard geofencing controls. The FAA confirmed that this is the case in an email conversation, stating that the regulator “does not require geofencing from drone manufacturers.” And indeed, other drone manufacturers, such as China’s Autel and Skydio in the United States, sell drones that don’t come with built-in geofencing software either.
From the company’s point of view, this move removes responsibility for enforcing U.S. restricted drone areas from itself—a responsibility DJI never wanted—and puts it back where it belongs, in the hands of the FAA.
At the same time, DJI’s decision to remove geofencing controls right now will likely come off as a startlingly provocative move from a globally dominant Chinese company in the eyes of many Americans who are already feeling hostile toward both China and civilian drone technology in general. Even if it weren’t intentional, the timing feels as if it’s daring U.S. lawmakers to finally ban Chinese drones, as they’ve been threatening to do for years—and have already done so for federal employees, and for governmental employees in some states. Indeed, on Jan. 3, the U.S. Commerce Department published an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking that appears to represent the first step toward a more comprehensive ban on foreign-made drones in the United States.
Remote ID has been active and federally mandated in the United States since last March, but it isn’t exactly the panacea that DJI makes it sound like in its announcement. While it’s certainly an improvement over the prior situation, in which drones weren’t meaningfully incorporated into U.S. air traffic control systems at all, there are still many bugs to work out.
Americans are also less than a month out from a national freakout over supposed sightings of rogue drones over New Jersey, resembling prior outbreaks of mass panic over weird stuff in the sky that have popped up in human history since at least the Roman era.
These mystery drone sightings provoked so much angst that the FBI had to issue an official statement emphasizing that it had no evidence that they were a security threat or perpetrated by a foreign actors. Crewed aircraft pilots reported a terrifying uptick in potentially pilot-blinding lasers (some attached to guns) pointed at their aircraft by paranoid drone-hunting citizens—who often proved equally terrifyingly bad at telling drones apart from bog-standard piloted aircraft. Even politicians such as Sen. Chuck Schumer felt compelled to acknowledge the moment, requesting that the Department of Homeland Security send a drone detection system to New York and New Jersey.
Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers have spent the past year stepping up their already long-standing attempts to push through bans on Chinese-made drones, which I’ve written about previously in Foreign Policy. Right now, however, there’s still no affordable or equally capable American or European substitute for Chinese-made consumer drone technology.
Up until now, DJI had worked hard to prevent U.S. lawmakers from banning its products entirely, spending $1.05 million on lobbying in 2024 alone and opening an expensive concept store in New York City in March 2024—which are not the actions of a company that’s actively inviting being imminently banned from a major market.
Which leads to one key question: What is DJI thinking?
While the timing of the announcement was indisputably unfortunate, according to DJI spokesperson Adam Welsh, who spoke to me on the phone, these changes were originally intended to take place about six months ago but had to be delayed for software testing reasons.
But some observers will certainly link DJI’s announcement to broader Chinese political brinksmanship with the United States, coming as it does just a few days before the impending deadline that will shut down TikTok’s U.S. operation if ByteDance, the video-sharing app’s parent company, fails to sell it off by Jan. 19.
Along those lines, others might speculate that perhaps DJI, and by proxy China, is engaging in a game of chicken with the United States over the banning of demonstrably popular Chinese technologies such as TikTok and Chinese-made drones. Perhaps China is bargaining that if U.S. regulators do ban these tools, the American public will respond so negatively that lawmakers will be forced to backtrack.
Perhaps DJI has also decided that it’s done with making gestures to U.S. regulators that have largely netted it little in the way of positive sentiment or feedback from U.S. politicians. And perhaps DJI and China are also, not unwisely, betting on China’s Shenzhen-based drone-making supply chain being so overwhelmingly dominant that no one else can compete without their assistance and that U.S. lawmakers (and others who may ban their products) will eventually be forced to come to their senses.
But I fear what could happen now is a cascade of events that will result in crackdowns on Chinese drones that will, one way or another, leave this revolutionary technology almost entirely in the hands of law enforcement, the very wealthy, and the military while preventing their use by everybody else. And ironically, such a move may make the skies less safe from rogue drones than they were before.
While there are companies in the United States and Europe that are hustling to make drones similar to those produced by DJI, these products come with a series of key issues for the average American drone-user, such as those engaged in disaster response, agriculture, scientific research, media production, and a whole host of other industries.
The first and most glaring among these is cost.
U.S.-made small drones tend to be far more expensive than those made with China’s structural advantages. U.S. drone manufacturer Teal (which is on the official Pentagon-approved Blue UAS Cleared list) sells its flagship Teal 2 drone for around $16,000 a unit; meanwhile, the broadly comparable Chinese-made DJI Mavic 3 Thermal Enterprise sells for around $6,000.
As U.S. drone manufacturers can’t compete on cost, almost all now orient their products around a specific set of deep-pocketed customers who are often legally barred from buying or using Chinese drones: the military and law enforcement. Unfortunately, this means that U.S. drone manufacturers largely aren’t paying attention to the specific needs of America’s vast contingent of other drone users engaged in a huge number of other activities, from collecting whale snot for scientific research to improving public infrastructure to helping emergency workers after devastating flooding in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
Right now, drone users are heavily reliant on Chinese drones, mostly made by DJI. If the United States decides to ban Chinese drones, I fear that huge numbers of these users will be left out in the cold entirely: Many (such as underpaid graduate student scientists and search and rescue teams) won’t be able to afford to replace their drones with approved U.S. models. And even those who do have the funds will have to contend with drones that are designed for military and law enforcement purposes, not for civilian-minded applications such as high-resolution photographic mapping and high-quality video collection for media production.
I know what many of you are thinking right now: Wouldn’t getting all those Chinese drones out of the sky be a good thing, if it reduces the number of idiots doing things like illegally flying over wildfires? I get the sentiment, but I believe that taking drones out of the hands of average people—and restricting them largely to the police and military—would be a bad thing for society.
First, there’s the paradoxical reality that if DJI and other Chinese drones are banned, while most drone users will simply have to give up on using them entirely, certain other actors will turn to less well regulated drones, including homemade models.
There have still been no major terrorist attacks using small drones in the United States (or in other nations that aren’t already experiencing major internal conflict or war); aspirant drone attackers, like the white supremacist who plotted to drone-bomb a Nashville energy facility and was arrested in November 2024, largely appear to be relying on DJI and other Chinese-made drones.
That’s a good thing because DJI drones are still equipped with Remote ID and with other signals that can easily be detected (and the drones thus intercepted) by specialized devices used by law enforcement, such as DJI’s own AeroScope drone detection technology. But as the Russia-Ukraine war has shown, homemade suicide drones are a real danger.
If bad aerial actors in the United States are forced by a total ban on DJI and other Chinese drones to learn how to build their own aircraft, we can rest assured that these drones won’t be equipped with Remote ID or other signals that law enforcement can use. And we may just inadvertently create a smarter kind of high-tech criminal.
Secondly, and most importantly, drones have proved to be a massively beneficial technology over the last decade, living up to, and exceeding, their early promise in the early 2010s. Today, they’re used in a vast array of industries, helping workers to more safely perform dangerous jobs such as infrastructure inspection and search and rescue, assisting farmers, and in many other creative-use cases.
These dangerous jobs include firefighting. Researchers in California (and elsewhere) are now using drones to map tree density to anticipate fire risk areas, to swiftly map areas impacted by wildfires to assist recovery efforts, and even to “sniff” for smoke with specialized sensors and to assist with controlled burns, among other uses.
Drones put the power of the aerial view, once restricted exclusively to the wealthy and powerful, back in the hands of average people. Just last month, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a Texas state law that banned using a drone to capture images, and publish them, over private property and critical infrastructure, which the law states includes hog farms (often targeted for drone overflights by activists) and correctional facilities. The move angered journalists, who pointed out that the law is being used to shut down what should be protected news-gathering activities.
We need alternatives to DJI, and we need more choices in the consumer drone industry in general—but those simply aren’t there yet. We also need to improve U.S. systems for detecting and intercepting rogue drones, and we shouldn’t put DJI, or any other private company, at the steering wheel of those efforts—a sentiment that DJI’s decision to stop geofencing, provocative as it may appear, actually aligns with. If we allow fear-driven bans on Chinese drones to go through, we’ll also be damaging our ability to balance the needs of drone users against airspace safety and security. Every group, from the police to air traffic control to drone experts and manufacturers, can work together to make this happen. Taking a revolutionary technology out of the hands of the public entirely is not the answer.
The post China’s Top Drone Maker Removes Security Features at a Very Weird Time appeared first on Foreign Policy.
