The FBI said that a former Apple employee has been charged with stealing autonomous car trade secrets before fleeing to China in 2018.
The suspect is 35-year-old Webao Wang of Mountain View.
His indictment is just one of five announced Tuesday by the newly-formed disruptive technology task force fighting against intellectual property theft which, according to experts, is an emerging threat.
“We ran to the people and I can see all the way up these stairs, just FBI agents in full gear,” said Corinne Pfister, recalling the day agents raided Wang’s home where he lived with his wife, baby and another relative.
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“Really nice, polite people who went to work, minded their own business,” said Pfister.
But the newly unsealed indictment paints a different picture.
It states Wang was hired by Apple in 2016 and nearly two years after gaining access to the company’s sensitive materials, he accepted a U.S.-based job with an unnamed Chinese company. But didn’t inform Apple until four months later.
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It was after Wong left that according to the U.S. Justice Department, Apple discovered he had accessed large amounts of proprietary data during his last days on the job.
“Among the materials discovered from the devices in Wang’s home was the source code for Apple’s entire autonomous system’s project as it existed around the time that Wang left Apple,” said Ismail Ramsey, U.S. attorney for Northern California.
According to the indictment, Wang bought a one way ticket from San Francisco to China and then took off on the same night his home was searched.
Local experts say the problem here isn’t the stolen information since artificial intelligence has evolved substantially in the last five years, the concern is the way it was taken.
“A coordinated theft is a big issue if it is acted upon quickly, companies from all over the world, people from all over the world, are trying to get away, it's a very competitive space. Actually applying these systems is really the issue, and typically companies are keeping that secret,” said Dr. Ronjon Nag, president of the R42 group.
If convicted, Wang can face up to 10 years in prison for each trade secret violation.
NBC Bay Area reached out to Apple for a statement on the indictment, but has not heard back.
