Apple has accused a company of stealing its trade secrets. In a complaint filed Friday, Apple alleges that Rivos, a startup based in Mountain View, California, led a recent “coordinated campaign” to poach employees from Apple’s chip design division.
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While not much is known about Rivos yet, the startup is primarily targeting silicon engineers in its job listings. Apple says the startup wants to design chips that will compete with its own, but the company believes Rivos intends to do so with proprietary information .
According to Reuters, the first source to report the lawsuit, Apple alleges that at least two former employees took gigabytes of confidential data with them to Rivos. Among the information these individuals allegedly stole are presentations detailing unreleased chip designs, Bloomberg reports.
"Apple has reason to believe that Rivos instructed certain Apple employees to download and install applications for encrypted communications (e.g., the Signal) before communicating with them further," the company says in the complaint.
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“Some used multiple USB storage drives to upload material to personal devices, accessed Apple’s most proprietary specifications stored in collaboration apps, and used AirDrop to transfer files to personal devices. Others stored massive presentations on existing and unreleased SoCs —labeled Apple Proprietary and Confidential—on their personal cloud storage drives. One even made a full Time Machine backup of his entire Apple device to a personal external drive.”
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If the case moves forward, it is likely to attract a lot of attention, just as Waymo's lawsuit against Uber for stealing confidential information about self-driving.
Information source: engadget.com
