He could face up to 10 years in prison. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Xiaolang Zhang has pled guilty to stealing trade secrets from Apple, where he worked on a self-driving car project from 2015 to 2018 (via CNBC). When he quit his job at Apple, he told his supervisor that he was going to work for Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology, a Chinese EV startup also known as Xpeng.
During an investigation, which you can read more about here, Apple determined that he had transferred around 24GB of “highly problematic” data to his wife’s laptop via AirDrop, and had also taken circuit boards and a server from the company’s autonomous vehicle lab.
The terms of Zhang’s plea agreement aren’t publicly available, but according to a court document uploaded by CNBC (pdf), Zhang pled guilty to the single theft of trade…
