A former Apple engineer gets accused of stealing automotive trade secrets

A former Apple engineer gets accused of stealing automotive trade secrets

Updated on August 25, 2022 10:52 AM by Sally Harbor

A former Apple employee of name  Xiaolang Zhang, who was accused of stealing computer files with trade secrets about Apple’s secretive car division, pleaded guilty in federal court in San Jose on Monday.

Xiaolang Zhang and his guilty crimes

Zhang’s plea agreement with the U.S. government is under seal, according to court filings on Monday. Zhang faces as much as ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine after pleading guilty to a felony charge of theft of trade secrets. The Sentencing of the case is scheduled to happen in November of this year.

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Zhang was accused of downloading internal Apple files about the company’s car project, specifically, a 25-page document including engineering schematics of a circuit board for an autonomous vehicle. Along with that, he was also accused of taking reference manuals and PDFs describing Apple’s prototypes and prototype requirements.

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The accused was arrested by federal agents in July 2018 at the San Jose airport, from where he is planning to elope to China. He had previously worked for Apple since 2015, most recently as a hardware engineer on Apple’s autonomous vehicle team, according to charging documents from the FBI and U.S attorney’s office.

Apple and its secretive nature that never ends 

The charges also gave a peek into a secretive side of Apple that the company even years later still doesn’t often acknowledge which is its division developing autonomous electric vehicles. 

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In the 2018 charging documents, an FBI agent said that the company had about 5,000 “disclosed” employees, which means that they knew about the project, and 2,700 “core employees” with access to project materials and databases.

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The company Apple uses internal software to track which employees are disclosed on which projects and are required to attend in-person secrecy training, according to the complaint. Zhang worked on the autonomous car project’s Compute Team, which designed and tested circuit boards for sensors.

Schematics for circuit designs are considered among the most valuable trade secrets in the electronics industry.

The suspected ex-employee of Apple

The complaint, which was filed in 2018, revealed that the company had first suspected the employee of stealing trade secrets after he took paternity leave and traveled to China soon after which he turned in his resignation, saying that he wanted to move back to China and take care of his mother. 

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He told Apple that he planned to work for Xmotors, a leading Chinese electric vehicle company, and his access to Apple’s network was cut. An investigation done by the company later found that Zhang had downloaded documents and information from company databases. Apple closed-circuit cameras even captured Zhang entering the labs and removing hardware, which later was identified as circuit boards and a Linux server, the complaint said.

Another former Apple employee, Jizhong Chen, is also facing charges related to allegedly stealing trade secrets from Apple’s electric car division in early 2019. In that case, Chen, a U.S. citizen, had also planned to travel to China the same as the former had planned. Chen has not pleaded guilty and is represented by the same lawyer as Zhang. A trial date has not been set for the hearings.

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