Former Apple Car Engineer Admits Stealing Trade Secrets Following Plea Agreement

Some of Apple's trade secrets for the Apple Car are now not-so-secret.

A former engineer who worked on the Apple Car has recently changed his plea to guilty after four years of investigation, per The Verge.

The engineer is being investigated for stealing trade secrets as he admitted to his superior in Apple that he was going to work for a Chinese EV startup in 2018.

Apple Car Trade Secret Theft Details

Xiaolang Zhang, the former Apple Car engineer in question, has recently pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets from Apple following his resignation from the company to work for Alibaba-backed EV startup Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology.

According to a court document uploaded by CNBC, Zhang has pleaded guilty to the theft of a 25-page document containing detailed schematic drawings of a circuit board for the Apple Car for use in interstate and foreign commerce as part of a plea deal.

The theft happened sometime back in 2018, when Zhang went home to China on parental leave to allegedly visit his ailing mother, per 9to5Mac. However, near the end of his leave, Zhang informed his superiors that he would not be returning.

Zhang did this for two reasons: to spend more time with his mother and work for Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology, also known as Xiaopeng Motors or Xpeng.

Xpeng was not only an EV startup company. Just like Apple's goal with the Apple car, Xpeng is in the business of developing autonomous technology for cars.

Around this time, Apple claimed to have noticed Zhang download around 24GB of "highly problematic" data to his wife's laptop via AirDrop and had taken circuit boards and a server from Apple's autonomous vehicle lab.

The highly problematic data Zhang transferred to his wife's laptop could be the information about the prototype version of Apple's Project Titan self-driving car technology.

Interestingly, Zhang designed and tested circuit boards as part of the compute team of the Apple Car, per a federal complaint filed in California's Northern District, per a separate report from The Verge.

Additionally, Apple noticed Zhang behaving evasively around the time of his exit, which prompted the company's New Product Security Team to investigate.

Zhang initially pled not guilty to the charges set by Apple following his arrest in 2018.

However, now that Zhang has pleaded guilty as part of his plea agreement, he could be facing less than what the US law demands in regards to theft of trade secrets, which is a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and a quarter-million dollar fine, per MacRumors.

However, the exact terms of Zhang's plea deal were not made publicly available as of press time, per CNBC. It is also unknown if Apple's trade secrets were acquired by Xpeng following Zhang's theft.

Not The Only One

Aside from Zhang, Apple is also in a legal battle against Jizhong Chen, another former Project Titan engineer accused of stealing trade secrets in 2019.

A Reuters report mentioned that prosecutors alleged that Chen took more than 2,000 files containing "manuals, schematics, diagrams, and photographs of computer screens showing pages in Apple's secure databases" with the intent to share them.

Chen's case is still ongoing; is being respresented by the same lawyer as Zhang.