If you love your drones and action cameras, then it's entirely possible that you've been worried about a potential DJI ban in the US. With good reason, too, especially when the US House of Representatives passed its 'Countering CCP Drones Act' back in May.
After that bill passed the House, it seemed like all the months of heated rhetoric were finally coming to fruition. Since the company and its products are popular and have been in use across multiple industries for several years, folks were understandably concerned about this prospect from several angles. What would become of the products they already owned? What would happen in the future?
Unsurprisingly, different companies had different solutions. There's US-based Anzu Robotics, which licenses DJI hardware technology to make drones that use software sourced from an American company (and more importantly, not sourced from DJI).
And then there's DJI's pivot to e-bike motors, which bear the distinction of not being drones. There's more than one way to crack an egg, right?
While it's not a full stay of execution, the US Senate also just handed DJI a lifeline, of sorts, in the form of the text of its own 2025 National Defense Authorization Act bill. While the text of the Senate version is nearly 1,200 pages long, do you want to know two things that are not included anywhere within its voluminous heft?
If you've guessed that I'm talking about the words "DJI" and/or "ban," then give yourself a pat on the back. But don't get too excited just yet.
The Senate hasn't passed its version of the bill just yet. First, it has to go to the Senate floor for discussion before it can be voted on. If it passes with no amendments, or with no amendments that concern DJI or similar drone ban language, then the next step will be for it to go through the reconciliation process.
For those unfamiliar with how the US House and Senate do things, that's where the two disparate versions of a bill that have passed in both chambers of Congress need to be reconciled into a single document that both chambers can (mostly) agree upon.
That could mean amendments, which includes the possibility that language related to the House's 'Countering CCP Drones Act' could find its way into the final document, even if the Senate omitted it from its version.
Will this happen? That's unclear, as are so many things these days. But for now, at least, the DJI drones get to fly a little longer.
