The Drone Service Providers Alliance wants AUVSI to treat Michael Robbins’ exit as a chance to change sides. In a release published Thursday, the operator advocacy group called on the trade association to end what it describes as a reckless policy direction, put drone service providers and first responders back at the center of its agenda, and build drone cybersecurity policy on measurable risk instead of country of origin.

The release lands two days after the departure news. Robbins leaves AUVSI on September 30 to run the Semiconductor Industry Association, chief operating officer Heather Lee becomes acting president and CEO on October 1, and the board has opened a search for a permanent successor. DSPA is telling that board, in public, what kind of candidate to pick.

DroneXL has documented the distance between AUVSI’s public statements and its lobbying letters since March 2024, and DSPA’s release reads like a bill for that record coming due.

DSPA Wants Security Standards That Test The Drone, Not The Flag

DSPA’s central demand is that drone cybersecurity policy evaluate what an aircraft actually does: what data it collects, where that data goes, how it communicates, and whether any of it can be independently verified. Country of origin, the group argues, is a label on the box, not a security finding.

The release says AUVSI’s advocacy under Robbins pushed restrictions on Chinese-manufactured drones and domestic manufacturing policy without weighing the cost to the people flying drones for a living. Commercial pilots, inspectors, surveyors, educators, and public safety agencies pick aircraft on capability, reliability, availability, and price, and pulling those aircraft before affordable replacements exist lands on American businesses and on first responders mid-mission. DSPA wants standards that are rigorous, transparent, and applied to every aircraft near sensitive sites, with policy built on “measurable risk rather than geography.”

The release backs building more and better drones in the United States; what it rejects is the premise that a domestic industrial base has to be built on the backs of American operators. That is the same position DSPA’s Vic Moss took when he urged pilots to file FCC comments against the sweep that put every foreign-made drone on the Covered List in December, and it extends the group’s earlier fight over Section 2209 preemption.

A Police Drone Feed Exposure Already Proved DSPA’s Argument

DSPA argues that the person configuring a drone program, not the logo on the airframe, decides whether that program is secure. The strongest recent evidence sits in DroneXL’s own reporting: a police department’s live drone feeds spent roughly six months exposed on the open internet, and the aircraft were American-made.

DroneXL reported on July 13 that someone at the San Francisco Police Department created a Skydio ReadyLink to five live drone feeds with no access code and a one-year expiration, and security researchers Sam Curry and Maik Robert found it after about six months in the open. The exposed fleet was NDAA-compliant and built in California. Skydio CEO Adam Bry later wrote that “our product made it much too easy” to create that kind of unprotected link.

Nobody serious blamed Skydio’s country of origin for San Francisco’s configuration error, and rightly so. Swap in any manufacturer on earth and the outcome is identical. That is precisely the standard DSPA is asking Washington to apply to every drone maker, and the SFPD case shows what happens when policy obsesses over flags while the actual failure mode, a human clicking through a sharing dialog, goes unexamined.

Heather Lee Inherits The Constituency Fight DSPA Wants Settled

Lee becomes acting president and CEO on October 1, and the board has announced no end date for its search. DSPA is asking that board for a leader who treats service providers as a central constituency rather than an obstacle, and who demands evidence before endorsing new restrictions.

Robbins joined AUVSI in 2020 and has led it since 2024, a stretch in which his congressional testimony and public appearances kept returning to Chinese technology and domestic manufacturing. DroneXL reported his departure for the semiconductor lobby on Tuesday, covered him defending a Covered List sweep broader than AUVSI says it requested at XPONENTIAL Detroit in May, and published the Utah records showing the gap between the association’s webinar assurances and its lobbying letters back in March 2024. (That archive now runs past a dozen articles, which says something about how often the words and the letters diverged.)

The first test of whether a reset is real arrives before the transition does. Comments in the FCC proceeding on pulling previously authorized foreign drones close September 2, while Robbins is still in the chair, and whatever AUVSI files there will show whether the association’s direction changes with its CEO or was never his alone.

DroneXL’s Take

DSPA is right, and I’ll say so without hedging. This release puts into one document what DroneXL has argued across more than two years of reporting: the country-of-origin fight has cost American operators far more than it has cost DJI, and a logo on an airframe is not a security assessment. A secure drone earns that label through testing and verification, whoever built it. The drone industry’s trade association should have been making that case in Washington all along instead of leaving it to an operators’ alliance in Lakewood, Colorado.

The security hawks did not invent their worry from nothing. Chinese state subsidies genuinely distort the drone market, and DroneXL has opposed that distortion as consistently as it opposes protectionism dressed up as security. Drones operating near sensitive facilities deserve hard scrutiny, which DSPA itself endorses. But scrutiny is a test you run, not a flag you check, and San Francisco’s six months of exposed American-built drone feeds should end any illusion that the checkbox version keeps anyone safe.

Whether AUVSI can reset is a different question from whether it will. The association welcomed the FCC’s December sweep within hours and was still defending the broad version in May, so the burden of proof sits with the board now picking a successor. Watch the September 2 FCC filing and watch who gets the permanent job. If the next CEO’s first public sentence is about American manufacturing and the second is not about American operators, the reset DSPA is asking for died in the search committee.

Sources: Drone Service Providers Alliance release, August 20, 2026; AUVSI announcement, August 18, 2026.

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.