What happens when DJI, the world’s leading maker of drones, is no longer welcome in the United States? You might think other dronemakers would see a huge opportunity with their competitor out of the picture. That didn’t happen.
In the 15 months since the United States triggered an automatic ban on future DJI products, no company has rushed to serve the consumers, prosumers, photographers, videographers, farmers, surveyors, and more that use DJI gear. Instead, US dronemakers are largely focused on a more lucrative opportunity: a billion dollars the Pentagon has earmarked for drones that kill.
Drone professionals are scared, says Vic Moss, cofounder of the Drone Service Providers Alliance, an advocacy group that represents over 33,000 pilots nationwide. “We don’t have what we need to complete the jobs we do if we don’t have DJI drones,” he tells The Verge.
But nobody is capable of filling DJI’s shoes, experts say. And those who might have tried are being scared off by Trump policy.
Just before Christmas, the FCC banned all future “foreign” drones, not just DJI, from entering the United States. Chinese dronemakers, an estimated 90 percent of the drone market, are out.
Last year, things were looking up for Zero Zero Robotics, one of the few Chinese dronemakers ever to step out of DJI’s shadow in the US. In 2024, my colleague Thomas Ricker gave its HoverAir X1 a glowing review; despite early issues, the company’s upscale X1 Pro and Promax made it into Costco and Best Buy stores. In August 2025, it announced a potential holy-grail product: a self-flying drone that can take off and land on water. It was on my shortlist of companies that might thrive if DJI got hosed.
But in December, after the Trump administration instituted its de facto import ban on all future foreign drones, Zero Zero’s US backers began to worry they might never receive the waterproof drone they paid for. What was expected to be a ban on just two Chinese dronemakers, DJI and Autel, had turned into a ban on every consumer dronemaker outside the US — and Zero Zero hadn’t managed to outrun that ban.
No device with a radio can be imported, sold, or marketed in the US unless the FCC authorizes it first, and that’s exactly what the FCC has stopped doing for foreign-made drones and foreign-made Wi-Fi routers. Devices certified before the ban are allowed, but Zero Zero didn’t clear two unexpected hurdles.
First, the FCC stopped certifying gadgets between October 1st and November 13th because of the US government shutdown. Second was the FCC’s surprise ban on December 22nd. In total, Zero Zero had only two narrow windows of opportunity, roughly 40 days each, after it started taking backers’ money.
Zero Zero has yet to receive FCC approval for the HoverAir Aqua, public records show. In the meanwhile, the company is slowly beginning to offer refunds. Publicly, the company has not admitted that its US-bound Aqua drones are dead in the water, though.
In January, it merely told Indiegogo backers that “the recent addition of foreign-made drones to the FCC’s Covered List has introduced significant regulatory uncertainty” and promised to ship them “as soon as possible.”
In February, it wrote that: “We are actively working through the necessary external processes to enable your shipments.”
As of March, the company was still suggesting that US backers can simply wait for their shipments “as we navigate the regulatory process.” But it also began offering to ship drones to Canada or other locations for pickup outside the US — and it has individually told backers that “if the US ban remains in place, we’re happy to process a full refund for your order.”
Zero Zero third-party spokesperson Jacob Hauge would not tell The Verge what it is actually doing to “navigate the regulatory process” or what percentage of its backers are in the US, suggesting the company does not want to share more info with the public or its competitors.
As far as we’re aware, Chinese companies like Zero Zero only have a few moves: they can sue (like DJI did), they can halt shipments indefinitely, or they can apply for “Conditional Approval” with the FCC — which means submitting a plan to manufacture its drones in the US.
Unlike Zero Zero, a company named Antigravity managed to thread the needle.
On December 3rd, it put the world’s first 360-degree drone on sale at Best Buy, exactly halfway through the window between the government shutdown and the foreign drone ban. The FCC processed its paperwork on November 18th, just five days after it got back to work, and so the Insta360-developed brand has one drone — and only one — it can freely sell in the US.
It’s off to a good start. The Antigravity A1 had already sold 30,000 units and made it to Costco by mid-January; now, it’s raked in tens of millions of dollars in global sales, Antigravity US CEO Michael Shabun tells The Verge.
But, the company’s ambitions don’t stop at just one drone, says Shabun. “The A1 was just our first product to market. There’s a number of products coming soon that are going to have different focuses, and 360 drones are just one of those.”
In an interview, Shabun drops a few hints about those future products:
- “How do we revolutionize the drone by making it more sophisticated and more knowledgeable and more intuitive?”
- “We really want to explore non-consumer applications, like what if you pair a super intelligent drone as part of a camera crew for a live sports broadcast?”
- “We’re talking to law enforcement, we’re talking to emergency response, we’re talking to fire about how they use the product and what improvements we would need to make in order for it to fully be this incredible tool for them.”
- “We’re talking to [Google] about enabling Antigravity for aerial Street View.”
Some of these features might work with the existing Antigravity A1. Shabun says an April firmware update will let the drone “automatically detect obstacles and go around them,” and the company’s exploring how to give professional broadcasters “a series of preframed shots that you cut to with a switcher” in the future.
But he also says the company is “exploring” the possibility of manufacturing new drones in the US. He’s not pretending future drones can get around Trump’s ban without that condition.
Shabun wouldn’t commit to US manufacturing, to be clear, or even say whether Antigravity has filed for the FCC’s conditional approval. “Of course our plan is to localize as much as we can, but I can’t comment on feasibility at the moment until we fully vet what that process looks like for us.”
But it sounds like there’s no other option. He suggests Antigravity won’t sue: “Our first solution is never to litigate” — and it won’t pull out of the US. “There’s no way we’re ever going to veer away from the US market.”
“If compliance means we need to have US-based manufacturing, that’s what we’re going to look into,” he says.
Antigravity is the only Chinese drone manufacturer that’s even publicly entertained the possibility of US manufacturing since the pandemic, as far as I’m aware — before that, DJI did announce it would assemble “Government Edition” drones in California back in 2019, and Autel announced a $10,000 “Made in USA” enterprise drone in 2020 where only 25 percent of the drone came from China.
What about companies outside China? I’m afraid none of the usual suspects have any interest — or at least none that they want to share with the public.
GoPro, which quit the drone business in 2018 after its Karma drone flopped, declined to comment. Parrot, pushed out of consumer drones in 2019 but which went on to build the US-government approved Anafi drone, declined to comment. Sony, which discontinued its $9,000 Airpeak cinematography drone in 2024, didn’t respond to a request for comment. Anzu, which licensed DJI tech for its commercial Raptor drone, declined to comment.
I did hear back from Skydio, though.
In December 2019, Skydio made the most impressive drone I’ve ever used. The Skydio 2 could truly fly itself, dodging obstacles along the way. But the following summer, Skydio began a three-year pivot to enterprise and government drones. Despite promises, it never released another consumer model.
Don’t expect that to change now. In 2024, when it became clear that DJI was facing down a ban, I asked if the company might want to take up the torch. Former Skydio comms VP Trevor Hammond replied:
As for what the future holds, we are 100% focused on serving the needs of first responders, critical infrastructure providers, and our armed forces. The market here is significant, the demand growing, and the positive impact to business and society massive.
Following the US foreign drone ban, his successor Rob Terra told me something similar: “The FCC decision doesn’t change Skydio’s strategy, it reinforces the direction the market was already heading, as America shifts from drones as toys and niche tools to operating as critical national infrastructure.”
He says that Skydio’s existing business will “demand our full attention for the foreseeable future.”
Among other reasons why Skydio might prefer serving the public sector: at $10,999 and up for an enterprise Skydio X2 versus $1,099 for the consumer Skydio 2, the company can build drones that literally cost 10 times more — not counting Skydio’s cloud portal, autonomous docking station and other contract-based services, some of which can cost $25,000 per year per drone.
Skydio has never produced drones at consumer volumes, anyhow; it had shipped fewer than 50,000 drones in total as of last March.
Few follow the drone industry like Haye Kesteloo, editor-in-chief of DroneXL and former editor-in-chief of DroneDJ. He says no one is coming to fill the United States’ DJI-shaped hole.
“What sets DJI apart is five things I haven’t seen any other company replicate,” he tells me, rattling them off one after another: “Availability, capability, affordability, reliability, easy-to-fly.”
We discuss company after company, but he says he can’t think of a single startup that’s chasing good, affordable consumer drones.
“The issue is that the financial incentives are much, much greater in the defense market and the first responder market than they are in the consumer market,” he tells me.
And that makes him worry about the future, he says, particularly if supplies of existing DJI drones and their parts begin to run out.
Image by Vjeran Pavic and Alex Castro / The Verge
“First responders, they’re using consumer drones for the most part. A lot of fire departments and search and rescue, those are volunteers with small budgets, so they’re not going to spend $50,000 on a Skydio program for a year. They’re going to buy two or maybe get gifted a handful of cheap consumer DJI drones, and those drones are going to be good enough to save people’s lives.”
“But that is all now going out the window,” he says.
Instead, most US drone startups are now chasing lucrative defense contracts, including $1.1 billion that the “Department of War” has allocated to jump-start “hundreds of thousands of weaponized, one way attack drones” by 2027. The US military has seen what Ukraine has done with small drones, and it wants some of that.
Even companies that had previously made consumer-grade products have been absorbed into defense-contract chasing entities. Teal Drones, created by a teenage professional drone racer, was recently one of the companies competing for a piece of the Department of War’s billion dollars, as part of Red Cat, a holding company that provides “advanced all-domain drone and robotic solutions for defense and national security.”
Meanwhile, consumer and FPV drone racing companies Rotor Riot and Fat Shark are now part of Unusual Machines, a company that advertises itself as a made-in-USA component supplier for small defense drones and features Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, as a board member with millions of dollars in shares. Fat Shark’s website hasn’t featured a new product since 2022. In its prospectus, Unusual Machines admits the “substantial majority” of Rotor Riot’s products are Chinese and so is Fat Shark itself.
Is it possible that defense industry innovations could make for better consumer drones in the future? “Absolutely,” says Moss. “Look at the advancements NASA and DoD have made in everything from Velcro to superglue.”
But Moss and Kesteloo both say a pivot won’t happen anytime soon.
“Maybe at some point if there is no war, they’re not burning through these drones and they need to increase their production, maybe they would pivot to the consumer market. But the financials need to be there to make that happen,” says Kesteloo.
“American companies can’t compete with Chinese companies, whether it’s a drone, a refrigerator, a microwave, we can’t compete in this country with the same level of labor cost,” says Moss.
Both say there’s no DJI substitute on the horizon.
“Everybody’s asking what else is out there, and the answer is, nothing,” says Moss. “I don’t know a single drone pilot, and I know a lot of them, who wouldn’t love to fly an American drone… but they’re not going after that 90 percent of the market.”
