Tesla Sued One Of Its Former Employees For Stealing Its Autopilot Source Code

A former employee of Tesla, Guangzhi Cao admitted in court that he had uploaded the Autopilot source code to his iCloud last year when he was still on the company’s payroll.

This year, Tesla sued Cao for exposing trade secret to a China-based EV startup called Xiaopeng Motors, a company with the support of Alibaba.

Cao denied the accusation from Tesla, and his lawyers argued that he had:

For now, he is the head of perception at Xiaopeng Motors. According to his LinkedIn profile, Cao is:

The joint filling from both parties filed last week revealed that Tesla had subpoenaed documents from Apple. While the iPhone maker has nothing to do with this particular lawsuit, there was a similar case in which it is involved. Last July, one of its former employees was charged with the theft of trade secret by the FBI.

The Apple’s employee is believed to Air Dropped data to his spouse’s laptop. CCTV cameras also caught him leaving the company campus bringing along equipment. The employee then left Apple to work for Xiaopeng Motors before being captured. Before Tesla, Cao was also a senior image scientist for Apple, as per his LinkedIn profile.

This lawsuit takes place amid the ongoing trade war between China and the US. The Asian country and some of its major firms were accused of doing “economic espionage.” Xiaopeng Motors, Tesla, Cao‘s lawyer, and Apple have not yet commented anything on this matter.

Earlier this year, Xiaopeng said that it had conducted an internal investigation in response to Tesla's accusation. Here is what it said:

Cao was one of the forty employees with direct access to the Autopilot source code. The company claimed that Cao had uploaded all of Tesla’s source code relating to this technology to his personal iCloud last year. The zip file is believed to contain over 300,000 directories and files.

Tesla said that in 2018, Cao removed 120,000 files from the computer in his workplace, deleted all of his browser history, and disconnected his iCloud about the same time he took the job offer at Xiaopeng Motors, the China-based firm that manufactures cars that bear a striking resemblance to those of Tesla. Plus, it is believed that Cao has attempted to recruit another Autopilot employee five months ago.

Cao admitted that he has:

He also confirmed that he made zip files with Autopilot source code last year and the date of XPeng’s job offer on the 12^th of December.

About the accusation that he disconnected his iCloud account, Cao said that he did it on the 26^th of December. However, he kept on logging into the company’s network between December 27 and January 1.

Cao did not say the time when he accepted the offer at XPeng, but Tesla confirmed that his last day of work at the company was the 3^rd of January. Cao denied the allegation that he had attempted to recruit a member of the Autopilot team for Xiaopeng Motors.

According to the filling, Cao:

He did not agree on the number of files Tesla claimed that he stole, and said that he had:

However, he did not say if he had deleted all of them from his personal iCloud account.

His lawyers said that if there were any file or source code left in his iCloud account, they would have been there “as a result of inadvertence.” They also argued that:

The joint filing also revealed that Cao had granted Tesla:

Apart from that, he also let the company access his Gmail account for investigation and Xiaopeng Motors:

Here is what Cao’s lawyer wrote in the court filing: