Apple has launched a lawsuit, filed on June 24th in the Superior Court of Santa Clara last week, accusing Mr. Di Liu, a former engineer on the Vision Pro team, of downloading thousands of sensitive documents and saving them in a folder named "Personal" and a sub-folder named "Knowledge" on his personal cloud storage.
The company's court filing details how Liu allegedly played his exit strategically. He gave his resignation at the end of October last year, telling colleagues he needed to focus on his family and health. Because of this, Apple allowed him a standard two-week transition period, during which he retained access to the company's internal systems.
The problem, according to Apple, is that he failed to notify the company that he had accepted a new job at Snap almost two weeks before his resignation. Apple claims that had it known he was jumping to a competitor, his access would have been terminated immediately.
During those final two weeks, Liu allegedly used his Apple-issued laptop to copy a massive trove of confidential files from the company's secure servers. The lawsuit claims these files contained valuable trade secrets, including information on unannounced products, R&D plans, and confidential product codenames related to Apple's spatial computing efforts.
According to the filing, Liu was a senior system product design engineer who worked directly on the Apple Vision Pro and related projects, giving him access to some of the company's most guarded information.
After leaving Apple, Liu took up a similar product design engineer role at Snap, which makes its own AR glasses called Spectacles. Apple's legal team argues this overlap is no coincidence, suggesting Liu plans to use the stolen data to benefit his new employer.
When approached by CNBC, a Snap spokesperson said the company has reviewed the allegations and has "no reason to believe they are related to this individual's employment or conduct at Snap".
In its prayer for relief, a section of the complaint that outlines its demands, the Cupertino tech giant wants a jury trial, damages to be determined in court, and for Liu to submit his personal electronic devices and cloud accounts for a forensic inspection to make sure every trace of the stolen information is deleted.
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