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A former Apple software engineer was charged with allegedly stealing Apple’s autonomous driving technology for a Chinese self-driving car company, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
Weibao Wang worked as a software engineer at Apple from 2016 to 2018, a DOJ indictment said. Wang worked on Apple’s Annotation Team, and was granted “broad access” to databases which the Justice Department said could only be accessed by 2,700 of Apple’s 135,000 employees.
Wang has been charged with six separate counts involving the theft or attempted theft of Apple’s “entire autonomy source code,” tracking systems, behavior planning for autonomous systems, and descriptions of the hardware that was behind the systems.
A year into his employment, four months before he quit his job at Apple, Wang accepted a job at an unnamed Chinese company which was developing autonomous driving technology and began to siphon “large amounts” of sensitive commercial technology and source code, the indictment alleged.
Law enforcement executed a search of Wang’s home in California on Jun. 27, 2018, where they found large quantities of stolen, confidential, and proprietary data, the indictment alleges. Wang was able to flee the country even after law enforcement executed the search, despite promising that he wouldn’t.
Wang boarded a flight to Guangzhou, China from San Francisco International Airport. In a press conference, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California Ismail Ramsey said Wang was in China and would face ten years in prison for each count if extradited and convicted.
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