Former Apple Employee Charged With Stealing Secrets For Chinese Firm

(RTTNews) - A former Apple Inc. (AAPL) engineer was arrested on charges of stealing driverless car secrets for a Chinese startup after he passed through the security checkpoint at San Jose International Airport to board a flight to China, according to reports.

Xiaolang Zhang was accused by U.S. prosecutors of downloading files containing proprietary information as he prepared to leave the iPhone maker in April and start work for Guangzhou-based Xiaopeng Motors, the reports said citing a criminal complaint filed Monday in federal court in San Jose, California.

Xiaolang Zhang, who worked for Apple from December 2015 until May 2018, has been charged in federal court with stealing trade secrets, and faces 10 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

Zhang designed and tested circuit boards as part of the compute team of Apple's autonomous car project, according to the federal complaint, which was filed this week in California's Northern District. In it, the company said that Zhang returned from a month of paternity leave at the end of April, and informed his supervisor at Apple that he was resigning so he could spend time with his ailing mother in China. In that meeting, Zhang also shared that he planned to work for an electric car startup in China called Xiaopeng Motors.

Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology, or known simply as Xpeng, was founded in 2014 by mobile internet entrepreneur He Xiaopeng. The company was founded shortly after Xiaopeng's mobile browsing business, UCWeb, was acquired by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.