Apple accuses engineers of stealing chip secrets with AirDrop and Time Machine

Apple is suing a stealth startup called Rivos for poaching engineers with access to secret company information. According to the complaint, Apple believes former employees stole proprietary information at the request of Rivos as part of the recruiting process.

While not much information is available about Rivos, it appears that the startup targets silicon engineers through job postings. Apple says the startup wants to design chips that will compete with their own, but the company believes Rivos is doing that with proprietary Apple information.

“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 designs,” Apple says in the complaint.

Ahead of the lawsuit, Apple wrote Rivos to clarify the confidentiality agreements that its employees had signed, but it didn’t respond.

Apple accuses outgoing employees poached by Rivos of stealing “gigabytes of sensitive SoC specifications and design files” in the lawsuit as well. The filing explains:

Some used multiple USB storage drives to offload material to personal devices, accessed Apple’s most proprietary specifications stored within collaboration applications, and used AirDrop to transfer files to personal devices. Some saved large presentations from Apple SoCs, both unreleased and Apple Proprietary, to their cloud storage drives. One even made a full Time Machine backup of his entire Apple device onto a personal external drive.

In its lawsuit against Rivos Apple named two former engineers from its chip team that joined Rivos last autumn. Apple is suing Rivos to recover trade secrets and protect them from further disclosure. The lawsuit also seeks to reveal the extent of the use made to reduce the damage that has occurred .”