Ex-Apple engineer arrested on his way to China with stolen data

For about two years, Xiaolang Zhang was privy to information to which many in the tech world can only dream of having access — the inner workings of Apple’s secretive autonomous car research.

Over the weekend, the former Apple engineer was arrested by U.S. authorities at the San Jose International Airport while preparing to board a flight to China and charged with stealing proprietary information related to Apple’s self-driving car project. At the time of his arrest, he said he was working for a Chinese start-up that is also developing autonomous vehicles, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in San Jose on Monday by the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office.

Zhang, who started working at Apple in December 2015, was accused of downloading files that included engineering schematics and technical reports before leaving to work for Xiaopeng Motors, a Guangzhou-based company also known as XMotors, documents said.

As a hardware engineer on Apple’s autonomous vehicle development team, Zhang’s position granted him “broad access to secure and confidential internal databases containing trade secrets and intellectual property,” according to the complaint.