Former Apple hardware engineer Xiaolang Zhang was sentenced in February 2024 to 120 days in federal prison and ordered to pay $146,984 in restitution for stealing trade secrets from Apple's decade-old autonomous-vehicle program, Project Titan, before attempting to depart for Chinese EV maker XPeng Motors. Zhang worked on Project Titan from December 2015 to May 2018, designing and testing circuit boards for autonomous vehicles, and was arrested in July 2018 at San Jose International Airport as he was about to board a flight to China. According to Apple's complaint, he transferred a 25-page document of engineering schematics for a self-driving-car circuit board to his wife's laptop via AirDrop, copied technical manuals describing Apple's prototype, and physically removed circuit boards and a Linux server from Apple's development labs, with CCTV capturing the removals after he announced his resignation following paternity leave and a trip to China. He initially contested the charges, then reversed course in August 2022, admitting one count of trade-secret theft; he originally faced up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The final sentence included three years of supervised release, with Zhang ordered to surrender by June 19, 2024 to a minimum-security facility near his San Jose home.

Sources

• -https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-14/ex-apple-engineer-sentenced-to-4-months-for-trade-secrets-theft
• -https://www.engadget.com/ex-apple-engineer-sentenced-to-six-months-in-prison-for-stealing-self-driving-car-tech-110537599.html