Apple Sues Startup for Allegedly Stealing Trade Secrets About M1, A15 Chips
Apple claims a little-known startup has stolen its trade secrets for the MacBook M1 chip and the iPhone 13's A15 mobile processor by poaching former employees.
Last Friday, Apple filed a lawsuit in a US district court against a startup in stealth mode called Rivos, which is allegedly developing its own competing chips. The trade secret theft occurred when the employees transferred gigabytes of sensitive information about Apple chip designs during their last days of employment at the tech giant.
“Starting in June 2021, Rivos began a coordinated campaign to target Apple employees with access to Apple proprietary and trade secret information about Apple’s SoC (system-on-chip) designs,” the lawsuit claims.
Apple says the employees lifted the sensitive chip designs by using multiple USB storage drives and the company’s AirDrop service. “Others saved voluminous presentations on existing and unreleased Apple SoCs—marked Apple Proprietary and Confidential—to their personal cloud storage drives,” the lawsuit adds. “One even made a full Time Machine backup of his entire Apple device onto a personal external drive.”
In addition to Rivos, the lawsuit names two former Apple CPU design engineers, Wen Shih-Chieh and Bhasi Kaithamana, for allegedly pulling off some of the intellectual property theft. According to Cupertino, both employees signed non-disclosure agreements, barring them from exposing Apple’s technology.
Rivos did not immediately respond to a request for comment. There’s not a lot known about the startup, which Apple says was founded in May 2021. But a website says the company is based in Mountain View, California, and is hiring "full-time and internship positions available in Austin, TX and Mountain View, CA."
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