A former Apple engineer on Monday pleaded guilty to criminal charges of stealing the company’s proprietary intellectual property before starting a job at a Chinese autonomous vehicle company.
Peter Blumberg for Bloomberg News:
Zhang Xiaolang, who was arrested in July 2018 while on his way to catch a plane to China, admitted Monday to a trade secret theft tally in a federal court hearing in San Jose, California, according to the electronic docket. of the court.
A judge ordered his plea deal to be filed under seal from public view and set Zhang’s sentence for November 14.
MacDailyNews takes: As we wrote in 2019, this “seems like an avoidable problem”.
In 2018, Reuters reported that the charges filed in the U.S. federal court alleged that Zhang revealed intentions to work for a Chinese electric car startup and booked a last-minute flight to China after dumped the circuit plan for a self-driving car.
In 2019, another Chinese citizen was accused of stealing Apple’s autonomous vehicle trade secrets. Jizhong Chen was accused of stealing proprietary information from the company’s self-driving car project while applying to work for a Chinese rival.
A search of a hard drive owned by Chen found thousands of sensitive Apple documents along with 100 photos taken inside the company’s self-driving facility, according to an FBI affidavit.
Chen pleaded not guilty and the case is still pending.
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