Former Apple engineer Xiaolang Zhang has been sentenced to prison for theft of trade secrets related to Apple's highly secretive autonomous car project, known as Project Titan. The case has been in the courts for more than six years since the FBI first charged Zhang with the crime back in 2018.
While working for Apple, Zhang was involved in the development of the company's autonomous driving technology. He was arrested in 2018 when he attempted to leave the United States to China where he had accepted a position with a Chinese autonomous vehicle company. Investigation led by Apple's New Product Security team revealed that he had accessed large amounts of sensitive information related to Project Titan including a 25-page engineer schematics document about a circuit board for autonomous vehicles. His actions raised alarms, leading to an FBI investigation that uncovered the extent of the data theft.
In 2022, Zhang pleaded guilty to the accusation. Now, the Northern District of California Court has sentenced Zhang to 120 days in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and ordered him to pay restitution of $146,984.
Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice also charged another ex-Apple engineer Weibao Wang for stealing databases containing sensitive and confidential information regarding the software used in their autonomous systems. Similar to this incident, Wang was accused of relaying Apple's proprietary information to an unidentified Chinese company involved in self-driving car development.
Apple's Project Titan has been shrouded in mystery since its inception. Recently, the company has decided to dial down its car's autonomous features and instead focus on more basic driver-assistance features in line with current Tesla capabilities. The car is now anticipated to launch somewhere between 2026 to 2028. It will reportedly use a Level 2+ automation system instead of a fully autonomous vehicle (Level 5) which was previously planned.
Via 9to5Mac
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