Former Apple engineer charged with stealing autonomous car tech trade secrets

The U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday it has charged a former Apple Inc. engineer with attempting to steal the firm's technology related to autonomous systems, including self-driving cars, and then fleeing to China.

The case was among five announced on Tuesday aimed at countering efforts to illicitly acquire American technology by nations including Russia and China. The actions were the first announced by a "strike force" formed in February in part to keep sensitive technologies away from foreign adversaries.

The former Apple engineer, identified as 35-year-old Weibao Wang, formerly resided in Mountain View, Calif., and was hired by Apple in 2016, according to an April indictment unsealed on Tuesday.

In 2017, he accepted a U.S.-based job with a Chinese company working to develop self-driving cars before resigning from Apple, but waited about four months before informing Apple of his new job, according to the indictment.

After his last day at Apple, the company discovered that he had accessed large amounts of proprietary data in the days before his departure, the U.S. Justice Department said.

Federal agents searched his home in June 2018 and found "large quantities" of data from Apple, it said. The same night the search was conducted, Wang was able to fly from San Francisco International Airport to Guangzhou, China, on a one-way ticket.

The Justice Department said in a statement that Wang is alleged to have stolen, or attempted to, six categories of trade secrets. Each carries a maximum statutory sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 US fine.

The department did not identify the company who offered the job to Wang. He has been identified in media reports since leaving the U.S. as the head of automated driving at Jidu, an EV venture controlled by Baidu and co-funded by Chinese automaker Geely.

Project Titan long in the works

Apple's automotive efforts, known as Project Titan, have proceeded unevenly since 2014, when the company first started to design a vehicle from scratch. A December report said Apple had postponed the car's planned launch. Reports filed with the state of California show Apple is testing vehicles on the state's roads.

Apple declined to comment on the case.

"We stand vigilant in enforcing U.S. laws to stop the flow of sensitive technologies to our foreign adversaries," Matt Olsen, the head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, said at a news conference. "We are committed to doing all we can to prevent these advanced tools from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries."

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, the department's No. 2 official, said in February that the "strike force" was a joint effort with the U.S. Commerce Department to safeguard American technology from foreign adversaries and other national security threats. Monaco said at the time that the United States would "strike back against adversaries trying to siphon off our most advanced technology, and to attack tomorrow's national security threats today."

Two of the cases announced Tuesday involved dismantling alleged procurement networks created to help the Russian military and intelligence services obtain sensitive technology. Two cases, including Wang's, were tied to former software engineers allegedly stealing source code from U.S. technology companies to market it to Chinese competitors.

The fifth case involved a Chinese network created to provide Iran with materials used in weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.

The Commerce Department last year imposed new export controls on advanced computing and semiconductor components in a manoeuvre designed to prevent China from acquiring certain chips.