A former Apple engineer agreed to a guilty plea as part of a deal with Federal prosecutors Monday after being accused of looting trade secrets from the company while working on its self-driving car technology with the intent to leak them to a Chinese competitor.
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Xiaolang Zhang pled guilty to one count of theft of trade secrets at a change-of-plea hearing. His plea agreement will be filed under seal, according to the hearing’s minutes.
It is alleged that Zhang downloaded proprietary information related to Apple’s self-driving car technology just days before accepting a job with a Chinese self-driving car company. According to the affidavit in support of the criminal complaint, Zhang specifically stole the schematics for a circuit board related to a hush-hush project to develop hardware and software for autonomous vehicles.
The same day he was attempting to leave San Jose, California for China in 2018, Zhang was arrested. That began the investigation by both The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Apple, leading to an initial not guilty plea in July of that year.
Before his departure, Zhang worked on the autonomous vehicle project for Apple dating back to December 2015. According to the FBI, he had attended trainings related to the stringent restrictions around intellectual property and signed an agreement that acknowledged his responsibilities as they related to intellectual property owned by the tech giant.
As a member of the team working on the project, Zhang had access to confidential databases that contain trade secrets and protected intellectual property, the FBI said in 2018.
The agency claimed that while on paternity leave for the birth of his child, he traveled to China and, only two days after his return to work, announced that he would be leaving Apple to move back. According to the FBI’s investigation, Zhang revealed to a supervisor that he would be employed by Xiaopeng Motors, an intelligent electric vehicle company upon his return.
His boss described Zhang’s behavior during the meeting as “evasive” and noted that he brought in a member of Apple’s new-product security division. As part of his departure, he was required to return two company iPhones and a MacBook laptop before being escorted off campus. Security workers found that in the immediate time leading up to his departure, Zhang used the Apple network on the devices “exponentially” more than the prior two years working at the company, the FBI said.
The agency also found that he’d been on the Apple campus on a weekend evening during his paternity leave, shortly before his voluntary resignation.
Apple investigators eventually found 40 gigabytes of recently added data on one of the computers handed over by Zhang, the FBI said. More than half of the data found was deemed “highly problematic” by Apple investigators, and the evaluation is still ongoing, the FBI noted.
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Source: https://www.law360.com/articles/1523497
