Illustration: The Verge
A former Apple engineer and the executive at an electric vehicle startup owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu has been charged with stealing Apple’s self-driving technology, as reported earlier by CNBC. On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice indicted and charged Weibo Wang with the “theft and attempted theft” of Apple’s autonomous driving tech.
As noted by the indictment, Wang started working at Apple as a software engineer in 2016, where he signed a confidentiality agreement and worked on the company’s secretive autonomous driving project. Wang resigned from his role in 2018, but unbeknownst to Apple, Wang accepted employment at “the U.S.-based subsidiary of another company that was headquartered in the People’s Republic of China and…