Apple Claims Former Engineer Stole Product Designs in Lawsuit

Apple has filed a new lawsuit alleging that one of its former senior engineers, Di Liu, stole confidential documents and trade secrets before quietly taking a job at Snap, the company behind Snapchat and the Spectacles smart glasses — reports SiliconValley.

Liu spent seven years at Apple, where he rose through the ranks to become a senior product design engineer. Before his departure, he worked on the research and development of the company’s Vision Pro headset.

According to the complaint, filed June 24 in Santa Clara County Superior Court, Liu told Apple he was leaving his role to spend more time with his family and look after his health. However, Apple claims he had secretly accepted a job offer from Snap two weeks earlier and failed to report that fact, allowing him to remain at Apple during the standard two-week offboarding period while maintaining access to confidential information.

During that time, Apple alleges Liu downloaded a “massive volume” of proprietary files and uploaded them to his personal cloud storage account. This reportedly included product design and development data, as well as sensitive production details related to quality control, cost, and supply chain strategies.

“Mr. Liu’s actions were deliberate,” Apple claimed, adding that logs from his company-issued laptop show he “individually selected the folders he copied and, in some cases, renamed and reorganized them after moving them to his personal cloud storage account.”

“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.”

The tech giant is now seeking unspecified damages and a court order requiring Liu to return the stolen material and submit his personal devices and cloud accounts for forensic inspection. Snap, which is not named in the suit, said it had “no reason to believe” the allegations are related to Liu’s work at the company.

Apple’s legal action comes amid a string of recent high-profile IP theft cases involving former employees accused of stealing sensitive information before jumping to rival firms.

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice brought charges against software engineer Weibao Wang, who allegedly stole Apple’s self-driving car technology and fled to China. Another former Apple employee, Zhang Xiaolang, was sentenced to four months in prison last year for IP theft, also related to Apple’s now-defunct autonomous car project.