Former Apple engineer Xiaolang Zhang pleads guilty to stealing confidential business information before jumping ship with Xiaopeng Auto

Xiaolang Zhang, a former Apple employee accused of stealing trade secrets from Apple's automotive division before jumping ship with Xiaopeng, reportedly pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court in San Jose on Monday, local time.

Court documents show that Zhang's plea agreement with the U.S. government is confidential. After pleading guilty to felony trade secret theft, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Sentencing in this case is scheduled for November.

Zhang Xiaolang was accused of downloading internal documents about Apple's car program. The documents, which totaled 25 pages, contained engineering schematics for a car circuit board. Xiaolang Zhang is also accused of stealing reference manuals and PDF documents about Apple's prototype products and prototype product requirements.

He has worked for Apple since 2015 and has since worked primarily as a hardware engineer on the automotive team, according to the FBI and prosecutor's office charging documents.

The allegations confirm something that Apple has rarely acknowledged publicly, even after all these years: the company was indeed developing driverless electric cars.

In the 2018 charging documents, an FBI agent said Apple had about 5,000 "disclosed" employees with knowledge of the project, and 2,700 "core employees" with access to project information and databases.

The indictment shows that Apple used internal software to track which projects were "disclosed" to employees and would require them to attend confidential training. Xiaolang Zhang worked on the computing team for Apple's driverless car project, designing and testing circuit boards for sensors.

Circuit design schematics are considered some of the electronics industry's most valuable trade secrets.

Apple began suspecting Zhang of stealing trade secrets after he took paternity leave and traveled to China, according to the 2018 indictment. He returned to the company at the time and submitted a letter of resignation, saying he wanted to return to China to care for his mother.

Zhang told Apple that he planned to jump ship to Xiaopeng Automotive and that his access to Apple's intranet had been revoked.

Apple's investigation found that Zhang Xiaolang had downloaded documents and information from the company's database, according to the indictment. Apple's surveillance cameras even captured images of Zhang Xiaolang entering the lab to dismantle hardware. It was later discovered that the hardware he removed was some circuit boards and a Linux server.

Attorneys representing Zhang Xiaolang have not yet commented. An Apple spokesman also did not respond.