A former Apple engineer and the executive at an electric vehicle startup owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu has been charged with stealing Apple\u2019s self-driving technology, as reported earlier by CNBC. On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice indicted and charged Weibao Wang with the \u201ctheft and attempted theft\u201d of Apple\u2019s autonomous driving tech.<\/p>\n
As noted by the indictment, Wang started working at Apple as a software engineer in 2016, where he signed a confidentiality agreement and worked on the company\u2019s secretive autonomous driving project. Wang resigned from his role in 2018, but unbeknownst to Apple, Wang accepted employment at \u201cthe U.S.-based subsidiary of another company that was headquartered in the People\u2019s Republic of China and was working to develop self-driving cars\u201d four months before his departure.<\/p>\n
After Wang left Apple, the company found that Wang accessed the company\u2019s confidential databases days before his departure and had law enforcement conduct a search of his home. While Wang complied with the search warrant, he boarded a flight to China that night. Law enforcement later discovered that \u201cWang accessed Apple\u2019s proprietary and confidential information\u201d about Apple\u2019s autonomous systems, including its source code, architectural design, motion planner, and more.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the first time that Apple has caught employees stealing trade secrets related to its car project<\/p>\n
Although the indictment doesn\u2019t say where Wang accepted employment during his time at Apple, a Reuters<\/em> article posted last year names Wang as the head of intelligent driving at Jidu, an EV subsidiary owned by Baidu, and notes that he previously worked on Apple\u2019s EV project. Company profiles spotted by CNBC also suggest Wang is an executive at Jidu.<\/p>\n Wang faces up to 10 years behind bars. He must also pay $250,000 or \u201ctwice the gross gain or loss resulting from the scheme\u201d for each count of theft or attempted theft of trade secrets. <\/p>\n \u201cInnovation is alive and well in Silicon Valley \u2014 indeed, throughout the Northern District of California,\u201d US Attorney Ismail J. Ramsey says in a statement.\u00a0\u201cUnfortunately, there will always be some who cheat the system by stealing and profiting from the fruits of others\u2019 labor. The Wang prosecution is but one example.\u201d<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first time that Apple has caught employees stealing trade secrets related to its car project. In 2018 and 2019, two employees were charged with stealing confidential details from Apple\u2019s self-driving project, while one of the engineers, Xiaolang Zhang, was accused of feeding them to the Chinese EV startup Xiaopeng Motors. Zhang fessed up to stealing Apple\u2019s trade secrets last year.<\/p>\n Correction May 18th, 8:52AM ET: <\/strong>A previous version of the headline incorrectly stated that the person charged is an executive at Baidu, when they are in fact an executive at an EV company backed by Baidu. We regret the error.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A former Apple engineer and the executive at an electric vehicle startup owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu has been charged with stealing Apple\u2019s self-driving technology, as reported earlier by CNBC. On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice indicted and charged Weibao Wang with the \u201ctheft and attempted theft\u201d of Apple\u2019s autonomous driving tech. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3420,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[76,78,80,83,86,89,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-3417","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-apple-news","8":"tag-apple","9":"tag-apple-guide","10":"tag-apple-news","11":"tag-apple-reviewsiphone","12":"tag-iphone-guide","13":"tag-iphone-news","14":"tag-iphone-reviews"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3417"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5114,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3417\/revisions\/5114"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eufad.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}