A California district court has decided in the legal dispute involving Xiaolang Zhang, an ex-Apple employee. Zhang has been sentenced to serve four months in prison and will have three years of supervised release after that. Additionally, he must pay $146,984 as compensation.
Zhang’s legal troubles started back in 2018 with a joint investigation by the FBI and Apple into suspected trade secret theft. Zhang was accused of stealing confidential information about Project Titan, which is what Apple calls its electric vehicle project.
When Zhang moved to China, he started working for XMotors, a Chinese company that focuses on self-driving car technology. Apple noticed Zhang’s suspicious behavior and decided to act. They found proof of his secret activities through his work network activity and his use of company devices while he was an Apple engineer. He had access to critical data because his job involved designing and testing circuit boards that process sensor data for autonomous vehicles.
Investigators discovered that Zhang took many sensitive documents from Apple, including a 25-page document on the engineering schematics for a circuit board used in self-driving cars.
In 2018, Zhang initially denied the allegations but later changed his plea to guilty in August 2022. This guilty plea has ultimately led to his sentencing for the theft of trade secrets from Apple.
