Visitors look at a Jidu Robo-01 electric SUV during the 20th Guangzhou International Automobile Exhibition at Canton Fair Complex on Dec. 30, 2022 in Guangzhou, China.
Zou Wei | Visual China Group | Getty Images
On Tuesday, the U.S. government accused a former Apple employee, Weibao Wang, of stealing trade secrets from the company’s self-driving car division, including the entirety of Apple’s “autonomous” source code.
The U.S. government did not identify in the charging documents who Wang works for now, but according to Reuters and severalcompanyprofiles, Wang is an executive at Jidu, an electric vehicle joint venture between Chinese internet company Baidu and Chinese car maker Geely.
The U.S. government is concerned that Beijing is using various tactics to steal proprietary information from American companies, including “corrupting insiders.” Tuesday’s announcement was part of a Department of Justice task force designed to “counter efforts by hostile nation-states to illicitly acquire sensitive U.S technology.”
Federal prosecutors have accused Wang of agreeing to work for a U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese automaker months before he left Apple in 2018, and of stealing privileged information dealing with Apple’s autonomous systems development, allegedly to give to an unnamed Chinese company.
According to a since-deleted LinkedIn profile that appeared in a Chinese-language interview, after Wang left Apple he began working at a health care artificial intelligence firm called Singularity.AI, which has offices in California and China. Following that, he worked as chief technology officer at Neolix, a Chinese self-driving car company. In 2021, Wang joined Jidu to run the company’s intelligent-driving efforts.
In June 2018, law enforcement officials searched Wang’s apartment on Apple’s suspicions that he had taken internal company files. Wang purchased a ticket and flew to China the same day, according to Tuesday’s filing. The charges suggest Wang can no longer travel to the U.S. without risking arrest.
Wang is the third former Apple employee from China to be accused of stealing trade secrets from Apple’s self-driving car division. Xiaolang Zhang, who worked at Apple around the same time as Wang, pleaded guilty to stealing trade secrets from Apple in August. And ex-Apple employee Jizhong Chen is also facing charges, but a trial date for his case has yet to be set.
Neither Zhang nor Chen were able to leave the country before they were arrested separately in 2018 and 2019, and Apple lawyers said in 2019 they were worried that they would flee to China.
Apple has reportedlybeen working on a self-driving car since at least 2015, although it has never discussed its goals or plans publicly and no car has been announced. The most public sign of Apple’s efforts is a fleet of cars with sensors for gathering data, which can be spotted driving around some California neighborhoods.
In February, Jidu confirmed plans to deliver its first car this year, and that it will be using ChatGPT-like technology in its vehicles.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment. An Apple representative declined to comment. Baidu and the FBI’s San Francisco field office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers remarks next to U.S. President Donald Trump at an ‘Investing in America’ event in Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2025.
Leah Millis | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will meet with President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday, CNBC’s Megan Cassella reported.
The meeting comes as Nvidia rose slightly on Thursday, becoming the first company to close a trading day with a market cap over $4 trillion, beating Apple and Microsoft to the symbolic milestone. Nvidia touched the mark briefly on Wednesday during trading.
Trump praised Nvidia stock in a social media post Thursday morning.
“NVIDIA IS UP 47% SINCE TRUMP TARIFFS. USA is taking in Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in Tariffs,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “COUNTRY IS NOW ‘BACK.'”
An Nvidia representative declined to comment, and it was unclear what the meeting is about, but Nvidia has been grappling with export controls on its artificial intelligence chips implemented by the Trump administration in April for national security reasons.
At the time, the U.S. government told Nvidia that its previously-approved H20 processor — intended exclusively for the Chinese market — would require an export license. Huang previously told investors that requirement effectively cut off Nvidia’s sales to China with “no grace period.” The AI chipmaker said that it would miss $8 billion in planned orders for the chip in the company’s July quarter.
“The $50 billion China market is effectively closed to U.S. industry,” Huang told investors on an earnings call in May.
Nvidia also faces another potential restriction on AI chip exports after the Trump administration cancelled a planned rule by former President Joe Biden called the “AI diffusion rule.” The Trump administration promised newer, simpler restrictions later this year on which countries could receive Nvidia’s technology.
Ex-CNN anchor Don Lemon‘s lawsuit against tech billionaire Elon Musk and his social network X over the cancellation of their partnership can proceed to trial, a San Francisco judge ruled this week.
Musk’s team had tried to get the case moved to a Texas court and tried to convince the judge to strike the complaint altogether.
Attorneys for Musk and X didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In an order Tuesday, Judge Harold Kahn said Lemon and his attorneys plausibly alleged, among other claims, that X and Musk had committed “fraud by false promise” and that there was “an implied contract” between them.
Lemon filed the suit in August 2024 after X canceled a partnership with the broadcast journalist a few hours after he taped a tense interview with Musk, who owns X. The interview preceded a planned premiere of Lemon’s new show on Musk’s social network.
During the interview, Lemon pressed Musk on several contentious topics he had posted about or amplified on X. Musk had boosted the so-called “great replacement theory,” and other bigoted tropes and falsehoods, including posts that claimed there was a “Hispanic invasion” of immigrants to the U.S.
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Lemon also pressed Musk about content moderation on X, and a reported surge in antisemitic content on the platform that occurred after Musk acquired it as Twitter in a $44 billion leveraged buyout in late 2022.
Musk made sweeping changes after taking over the site, firing huge numbers of personnel and reversing account bans for users who had been booted from the platform after posting hate speech or inciting violence.
Musk, who characterized himself as a free speech “absolutist” also restored the account of President Donald Trump. The site had permanently banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 following the attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol.
Lemon’s case against Musk and X Corp. is in San Francisco Superior Court. A date has not been set for the trial.
Musk and X have faced a litany of other lawsuits over non-payment to vendors and over failure to provide severance as promised to laid-off employees from Twitter.
Lemon was fired from CNN in 2023 following reports that he mistreated coworkers and made sexist remarks on-air, including about politician Nikki Haley. Lemon later apologized for the Haley comments.
Bitcoin climbed to new all-time high on Thursday, building on its previous record reached just a day earlier, as investors jumped into risk assets and liquidated short positions.
The price of the flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by about 2% at $113,459.16. Earlier, it rose as high as $113,863.18.
On Thursday afternoon, bitcoin saw about $318 million in short liquidations across centralized exchanges in a 24 hour period, according to CoinGlass. When traders use leverage to short bitcoin and the cryptocurrency’s price rises, they buy bitcoin back from the market to close their positions, which pushes the price up and causes more positions to be liquidated.
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