A former Chinese-origin Apple employee, accused of stealing trade secrets about the tech giant’s car vehicle division, has confessed in a court in the US.
Xiaolang Zhang was accused for downloading inside Apple records about the vehicle that Apple intends to unveil in 2024.
As per a CNBC report late on Monday, Zhang has to deal with 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine. His condemning is planned for November.
Zhang was accused of downloading internal Apple files that included “engineering schematics of a circuit board for an autonomous vehicle”.
He was likewise blamed for taking instructional booklets and PDFs depicting Apple’s prototype and prototype requirement, the report mentioned.
During an internal investigation, Apple found that he had transferred around 24GB of sensitive data to his wife’s laptop via AirDrop.
He had also taken circuit boards and a server from the company’s autonomous vehicle lab.
Zhang was arrested at the San Jose airport in the US in 2018 while trying to fly to China.
Another former employee, Jizhong Chen, is also facing charges over allegedly stealing trade secrets from Apple’s electric car division.
Apple has ramped up its efforts to develop a self-driving car, and has filed several new patents in software and hardware related to riding comfort such as seats and suspension.
The iPhone maker is also working on vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology, which allows cars to communicate with each other and connect to the Internet of Things (IoT), according to media reports.
In January last year, Hyundai Motor was said to be in talks with Apple for self-driving technology. The South Korean automaker later denied this.
Apple remains tight-lipped about its self-driving ambitions.
(inputs from IANS)