A former Apple engineer on Monday pled guilty to criminal charges that he stole the company’s proprietary intellectual property before starting a job at a Chinese autonomous vehicle company.
Peter Blumberg for Bloomberg News:
Zhang Xiaolang, who was arrested in July 2018 on his way to catch a plane to China, admitted to one count of trade-secret theft at a hearing Monday in federal court in San Jose, California, according to the court’s electronic docket.
A judge ordered his plea agreement to be filed under seal from public view and set Zhang’s sentencing for Nov. 14.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in 2019, this “seems like an avoidable problem.”
Back in 2018, Reuters reported that the charges filed in U.S. federal court alleged that Zhang disclosed intentions to work for a Chinese electric car startup and booked a last-minute flight to China after downloading the plan for a circuit board for a self-driving car.
In 2019, another Chinese national was charged with stealing Apple’s autonomous vehicle trade secrets. Jizhong Chen was charged with stealing proprietary information from the company’s self-driving car project while applying to work for a Chinese rival.
A search of a hard drive owned by Chen found thousands of sensitive Apple documents along with 100 photos taken inside the company’s self-driving facility, according to an FBI affidavit.
Chen has pleaded not guilty and the case is still pending.
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If I’m going to be honest with you, in my own humble opinion without being sentimental of course, without offending anyone who thinks differently from my own point of view, but also by looking into this matter from a distinctive perspective, I would like to say I have nothing to say.
I think a career in politics beckons
If you don’t think this is happening in hundreds of other lessor know tech, financial, construction, aerospace companies and on and on…. You might be horribly naive.
Don’t worry, Joe (and Hunt) have everything out of control!
How else are they expected to complete?
imagine where CCP China would be if all the stolen IP was suddenly taken away from them. They would be pulling civil war canons behind badly abused horses. Left to their own abilities communism creates very little. Taiwain on the other hand is the real historical and culture history of China.
Americans and Western Europeans have been sleeping for so long. Chinese has “1,000 talented programs” to steal Americans and Western Europeans technologies for years. And another “The United Fronts” means Chinese people have been living oversea even 3, 4 generations but their hearts toward their motherland. When the CCP calls they will act upon.