Apple autonomous driving tech secrets stolen by ex-engineer, feds say

A former Apple engineer has been charged by the US Department of Justice for stealing and attempting to steal trade secrets from his employer. The indictment was unsealed by a federal court in California as part of a series of cases arising from a new collaboration by government agencies to crack down on "efforts by hostile nation-states to illicitly acquire sensitive US technology to advance their authoritarian regimes and facilitate human rights abuses."

According to DOJ, Weibao Wang was hired by Apple as a software engineer in 2016, where he worked on the company's secretive autonomous driving project, also known as Project Titan. But 18 months later, Wang accepted a job working on autonomous driving with another company--one headquartered in China. The indictment says he waited four more months to tell Apple he was leaving.

The DOJ says that after Wang's final day at Apple in 2018, the company found that he had "accessed large amounts of sensitive proprietary and confidential information in the days leading up to his departure." A search of Wang's home in Mountain View, California, turned up large quantities of Apple's data, and that evening Wang flew from San Francisco to Guangzhou on a one-way ticket.

Wang has been charged with six counts of stealing or attempting to steal trade secrets. He faces up to 10 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines for each count.

The Disruptive Technology Strike Force, which is led by the DOJ and Department of Commerce, also brought two cases against "alleged procurement networks" helping the Russian military and intelligence services; another case involving a software engineer stealing trade secrets from a US company for a Chinese competitor; and a fifth case concerning a Chinese network attempting to provide Iran with isostatic graphite for the Iranian nuclear weapons program.

"Protecting sensitive American technology--like source code for 'smart' automotive manufacturing equipment or items used to develop quantum cryptography--from being illegally acquired by our adversaries is why we stood up the Disruptive Technology Strike Force," said Matthew Axelrod, assistant secretary for export enforcement at the Department of Commerce. "The Strike Force actions announced today reflect the core mission of our Export Enforcement team--keeping our country's most sensitive technologies out of the world's most dangerous hands."