By LIU Zeran

ZHANG Xiaolang, a former engineer at Apple who now works for Chinese EV startup Xpeng, pled guilty in federal court in San Jose on Tuesday over charges of stealing trade secrets about Apple’s car division, CNBC reported.

Zhang was arrested in 2018 at San Jose airport when heading back to China. Zhang was accused of downloading 24GB of “highly sensitive” internal documents and airdropping them to his wife’s laptop. He was also accused of taking a circuit board and a server from Apple’s laboratory.

Sentencing is scheduled for November. Zhang faces up to ten years imprisonment and US$250,000 (1.7 million yuan) in fines.

XPeng released a statement on Weibo Tuesday afternoon, acknowledging progress in the case and insisting the company has no involvement in the case. “We have no dispute against Apple and the case has nothing to do with XPeng,” read a statement. “We highly value intellectual property and will continue developing products independently.”

Zhang is not the first XPeng employee accused of stealing secrets from former employers. In 2019, Tesla said one of its former employees had uploaded part of the source code of the company’s Auto Pilot system to his personal iCloud. At the time XPeng said it respected “all third-party intellectual properties” and had found no evidence to back up Tesla’s claim.