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 is the third former Apple employee to be accused of stealing autonomous trade secrets for China.
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 the U.S.-based subsidiary of an unnamed Chinese company that was developing autonomous driving technology and he began to siphon “large amounts” of sensitive commercial technology and source code, the indictment alleges.
In April 2017, only 5,000 of Apple’s 135,000 full-time employees had been informed about the project, the DOJ indictment alleges, or around 4% of the company.
An even smaller segment, around 2%, had access to “one or more” of the databases Wang accessed, the indictment continues.
Law enforcement executed a search of Wang’s home in California on June 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.
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