A customer tries on the Apple Vision Pro headset during the product launch at the Apple Store in New York City on February 2, 2024.
Angela Weiss | AFP | Getty Images
Apple has accused a former engineer for its Vision Pro headset computer of stealing company trade secrets before starting a new job at Snap, according to a lawsuit filed in California last week.
In the June 24 court filing, Apple accuses Di Liu, a senior design engineer, of downloading thousands of documents in his final days at the Cupertino company last year and saving them to his personal cloud accounts.
This lawsuit is the latest example of Apple publicly going after a former employee for leaking internal information. Apple is an intensely secretive company, and lawsuits like this one highlight how the iPhone maker exercises tight control over its internal information, even if it has to pursue legal action against former staff.
Apple alleges that Liu didn’t inform the company when he resigned late last year that he was headed to Snap, a competitor and maker of smart glasses. As a result, Apple did not shut off his access to accounts and allowed him a customary two-week transition period, which he used to download company files, according to the lawsuit.
“Worse still, the review of Mr. Liu’s Apple-issued work laptop also shows that while maintaining access to Apple’s Proprietary Information under false pretenses, he used his Apple credentials to exfiltrate thousands of documents containing Proprietary Information from Apple’s secure file storage systems,” the iPhone maker’s lawyers said in the filing.
Many of the files downloaded by Liu had codenames for Apple projects and described the company’s technology, product design and supply chain, according to the lawsuit. Apple says that all employees agree to keep Apple files confidential and that Liu broke confidentiality agreements he made when he joined. Liu worked for Apple between 2017 and 2024, according to the lawsuit.
Liu worked on Apple’s Vision Pro headset as a system product design engineer, per the filing. Liu did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
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Apple lawyers wrote that Liu could use the trade secrets in his work at Snap. Apple is not suing Snap, and the social media company did not respond to a request for comment.
“The overlap between Apple’s Proprietary Information that Mr. Liu retained and Snap’s AR products (for which Mr. Liu is a ‘product design engineer’) suggests that Mr. Liu intends to use Apple’s Proprietary Information at Snap,” according to the filing.
Apple is seeking damages and for Liu to have his devices inspected by a forensic examiner to make sure all the trade secrets are deleted.
The iPhone maker has sued several former employees in recent years for taking files when they left the company.
Apple settled with former engineer Simon Lancaster in 2022 over providing information to a journalist. Apple also sued a former employee, Andrew Aude, in 2024 over leaking details to the media. That lawsuit was dismissed after Aude apologized.
The Cupertino company sued Rivos, a chip startup staffed by former Apple semiconductor employees, over its intellectual property, and settled in 2024.
Additionally at least three former Apple employees have also been arrested and accused by the government of taking company secrets and giving them to China-linked organizations. One pled guilty and was sentenced to four months in prison, and two are still in proceedings.
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