that on Tuesday, the DOJ announced that former Apple software engineer Weibao Wang had been indicted on suspicion of stealing vital autonomous technology from the tech giant for a Chinese self-driving car company.
Wang worked as a software engineer for Apple’s Annotation Team from 2016 to 2018. Due to his position, he had extensive access to certain databases that, as the DOJ indictment noted, only 2,700 of Apple’s 135,000 employees could access. The DOJ claims that Wang started siphoning off “large amounts” of confidential commercial technology and source code four months before he left Apple to accept a position at the American branch of an unnamed Chinese company that was developing autonomous driving technology.
On June 27, 2018, law enforcement searched Wang’s California home and allegedly discovered a sizable amount of stolen, secretive, and proprietary data there. Wang fled to China despite saying he wouldn’t leave the country.