Ex-Apple employee Xiaolan Zhang was arrested at San Jose International Airport, where he was about to board a last-minute flight to China back in 2018. Zhang was accused of transferring to his wife’s laptop a 25-page document containing engineering circuit boards for the company’s self-driving car, as well as technical manuals describing the Apple prototype. He was also accused of stealing circuit boards and a Linux server from the company’s labs.
CNBC reports that Zhang pleaded guilty to criminal charges of trade secret theft in San Jose federal court. The news organization obtained a court document (PDF) summarizing the trial in which Zhang changed his guilty plea. The fact is that he didn’t initially plead guilty when he was indicted in 2018. In it, the court noted that the plea agreement was sealed and that sentencing was set for Nov. 14. Zhang faces up to ten years in prison and could pay a fine of up to $250,000.
Before his arrest, Zhang worked as a hardware engineer in Apple’s autonomous vehicle division and designed and tested printed circuit boards for sensors. As CNBC notes, the circuits are generally considered some of the most valuable trade secrets in electronics.
According to reports, Apple first caught Zhang’s suspicion of theft when he submitted his resignation after maternity leave and a trip to China. He told the company he was quitting so he could return to China to take care of his mother. Zhang also told Apple that he plans to work with XPeng Motors, an electric car maker that is also developing its own autonomous driving technology.
After he was fired, access to Apple’s resources was shut down, and an investigation followed shortly thereafter. Apple’s investigation revealed that he was transferring gigabytes of top secret files via AirDrop and saw him physically picking up equipment from the company’s labs in surveillance footage.
Nevertheless, Apple remains as secretive about its progress in developing autonomous cars as ever. Mark Gurman from Bloomberg reported last year that Apple had decided to focus on developing fully autonomous driving capabilities and that the company intended to launch its autonomous electric car in 2025.
