Ex-Apple engineer sentenced to 4 months in jail. Here’s why

Former Apple engineer Xiaolang Zhang, who pleaded responsible to stealing data associated to the corporate’s ‘Project Titan’ autonomous automobile efforts, has been sentenced to 120 days in jail, and fined $146,984, court docket paperwork of his sentencing present.

Additionally, after finishing his jail time period, Zhang, who initially confronted as much as 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fantastic, should serve a three-year supervised launch, the court docket dominated. He is predicted to give up by June 19; after this, he will likely be despatched to a minimum-security facility as shut as potential to his house in San Jose, California.

The ex-Apple engineer was arrested in July 2018 on the San Jose International Airport simply as he was about to board a flight to China. He initially pleaded not responsible, although he modified his thoughts and pleaded responsible in August 2022.

The theft

Zhang, who was a {hardware} engineer on Project Titan, transferred a 25-page doc containing engineering schematics of the proposed car’s circuit board, to his spouse’s laptop computer. He additionally saved a duplicate of technical manuals that described the car’s prototype to that laptop computer.

He additionally stole circuit boards and Linux servers from the tech large’s improvement labs.

How Apple got here to know

Following a paternity depart and a visit to China, the engineer resigned from the iPhone maker; his resignation letter knowledgeable the Cupertino, California-based agency that he was going to China to work for XPeng Motors.

As Xpeng too was engaged on self-driving know-how, Apple carried out an investigation, and caught Zhang on CCTV taking {hardware} from the corporate’s labs, and transferring knowledge to his spouse’s pc, resulting in the lawsuit.