Apple sues former employee for allegedly stealing confidential Apple Vision Pro data and taking it to a rival company
Apple has filed a lawsuit against a former employee for allegedly stealing confidential research materials for Apple Vision Pro. According to the lawsuit, the former employee, who worked as a senior design engineer for Apple Vision Pro, downloaded thousands of documents, including confidential materials, from Apple's internal systems and stored them in a personal cloud storage account on his last day at work, Apple alleges.
apple v di liu | DocumentCloud
Apple claims San Jose engineer stole trade secrets, took them to rival
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2025/06/30/apple-san-jose-engineer-stole-trade-secrets-rival/
Apple accuses former Vision Pro engineer of stealing trade secrets | The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/news/695929/apple-lawsuit-vision-pro-secrets-snap
According to a complaint filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court on June 24, 2020, former Apple employee Di Liu explained his resignation as 'for health reasons,' so Apple did not immediately revoke his access to the company's internal systems. However, in fact, Liu had already agreed to take a job as a product design engineer at Snap, the company that operates the photo-sharing app Snapchat, when he offered to resign from Apple.
'Liu's actions were intentional. Logs from the Apple-issued work PC show that Liu individually selected the folders he copied, and in some cases renamed or rearranged them after moving them to his personal cloud storage account. Furthermore, Liu intentionally deleted files from the Apple-issued work PC to conceal the movement of files,' Apple said.
While Apple said it could not identify the exact information Liu downloaded, it said the materials 'may have included product design and development information, as well as manufacturing information relating to quality control, costs and supply chain strategies.'
Apple further argues that Liu's access to confidential documents is related to Snap's development of AR glasses , and that this suggests Liu intends to use Apple's confidential information at Snap.
Apple is seeking unspecified damages from Liu for breach of contractual obligations, as well as the return of the stolen documents. Snap told tech news site SiliconValley that it had 'reviewed the allegations in Apple's lawsuit and has no reason to believe they are related to any of the individual's employment or conduct at Snap.'
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