Engineer admits he stole trade secrets while working on the Apple Car

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

XiaolangZhang pled guilty to stealing trade secrets from Apple and working on a self-driving car project. After quitting his job at Apple, he told his supervisor that he was going to work for a Chinese EV startup.

During an investigation, Apple determined that he had transferred a large amount of data to his wife's laptop via AirDrop, and had also taken circuit boards and a server from the company's self-driving car lab.

According to a court document uploaded by CNBC, Zhang pled guilty to a single theft of trade secrets count in his indictment. He will be sentenced on November 14th. According to US law, theft of trade secrets can result in a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and a $250,000 fine.

He is not the only person who has been accused of stealing trade secrets from Apple. A former Apple employee was charged with trying to smuggle documents from the company to China. CNBC says his case is still going on.

In the same year, it was claimed that a former employee of the company uploaded source code for its Autopilot system to his iCloud account. The company said it respected any third-party's intellectual property rights.

The cases of trade secret theft have been going on for several years. It seems that the project has been difficult for Apple, despite recent rumors that it could be announced in 25 years. A lack of faith in the project from some Apple higher-ups as well as high turnover for both engineers and leadership have been reported.