Third Apple employee charged over self-driving technology theft

18 May 2023

Apple’s autonomous vehicle Titan Project is back in the news, but not in the way we’d expect. The Department of Justice announced it had filed charges against a third Apple employee in the ongoing investigation of technology theft from the company.

The charges were filed at the US District Court in San Francisco against Weibao Wang. Wang is being accused of a vast array of criminal actions - theft of technology, attempted theft of autonomy source code, attempted theft of tracking systems, behavioral planning systems, and system hardware design and descriptions.

Weibao Wang was employed by Apple for just one year, he worked on an Annotation Team for the, and unfortunately, he was one of 2,700 employees who had access to the databases with all the information related to Project Titan. During the last 4 months of his employment, he was under contract for a US subsidiary of a Chinese autonomous driving tech company, and he engaged in siphoning off large amounts of sensitive data from Apple.

In June 2018, Wang’s home was searched by DoJ and a huge cache of confidential and proprietary data from Apple was found. This is where DoJ slipped up because, despite the evidence, Wang wasn’t detained and was allowed to leave the country. He currently is in China after jumping on the first available flight to Guangzhou, and he has no intention of coming back.

If Wang was to be extradited from China, he would be facing a 10-year jail sentence on each count, if convicted, plus a fine of $250,000 on each count. That is a highly unlikely outcome though, considering Wang is an executive at the Chinese Jidu - an EV joint venture between Baidu and Geely. He is in charge of Jidu’s autonomous technology department after working as a CTO for Neolix, another Chinese self-driving tech company, after he fled the US. Since then, Jidu unveiled Robo 01 and Robo 02 electric vehicles.

Wang is the third employee of Apple charged with technology theft, Xiaolang Zhang was the first after he was caught stealing a 25-page schematic of a circuit board and attempting to board a flight to Beijing with it. Another Chinese national, Jizhong Chen, was arrested by the FBI for stealing the secret tech from Apple just a day before he was scheduled to fly to China.

The Department of Justice is becoming increasingly concerned with the Chinese efforts to steal technology at any cost from American companies. The DoJ set up a dedicated task force to deal with those efforts, and the announcement of the charges is meant to put similar attempts off. In reality, as long as there are secrets, there will be people trying to steal them.

Via