Ex-Apple engineer sentenced to 4 months in prison. Here's why

Xiaolang Zhang has also been fined $146,984.

Published on: Feb 10, 2024, 12:26:49 IST

By HT News Desk, New Delhi

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Former Apple engineer Xiaolang Zhang, who pleaded guilty to stealing information related to the company's ‘Project Titan’ autonomous car efforts, has been sentenced to 120 days in prison, and fined $146,984, court documents of his sentencing show.

Apple Inc. logo (File Photo/REUTERS)

Additionally, after completing his jail term, Zhang, who originally faced up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, must serve a three-year supervised release, the court ruled. He is expected to surrender by June 19; after this, he will be sent to a minimum-security facility as close as possible to his home in San Jose, California.

The ex-Apple engineer was arrested in July 2018 at the San Jose International Airport just as he was about to board a flight to China. He initially pleaded not guilty, though he changed his mind and pleaded guilty in August 2022.

The theft

Zhang, who was a hardware engineer on Project Titan, transferred a 25-page document containing engineering schematics of the proposed vehicle's circuit board, to his wife's laptop. He also saved a copy of technical manuals that described the vehicle's prototype to that laptop.

He also stole circuit boards and Linux servers from the tech giant's development labs.

How Apple came to know

Following a paternity leave and a trip to China, the engineer resigned from the iPhone maker; his resignation letter informed the Cupertino, California-based firm that he was going to China to work for XPeng Motors.

As Xpeng too was working on self-driving technology, Apple conducted an investigation, and caught Zhang on CCTV taking hardware from the company's labs, and transferring data to his wife's computer, leading to the lawsuit.

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