Apple files lawsuit against former employee for taking Vision Pro secrets to Snapchat

Apple has officially filed a lawsuit against a former employee for allegedly taking company secrets about the Vision Pro mixed reality headset over to Snap, the creators of the popular social app Snapchat.

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The lawsuit has been filed against former Vision Pro engineer Di Liu, who has been accused of stealing thousands of confidential files related to Apple's augmented reality headset. The theft of these files was then allegedly taken to Snap, a competitor of Apple.

Moreover, the lawsuit alleges that Liu secretly accepted a job offer from Snap, while also attempting to cover his tracks of the stolen documents by deleting files, which Apple alleges violated the confidentiality agreement he signed when he accepted his position at the Cupertino company.

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Snap has since pivoted from making what the company was originally intending to be Snapchat-connected smartglasses to an Augmented Reality product, oddly similar to the Apple Vision Pro. According to Apple, Liu resigned from the company on October 30, 2024, and said that he wished to spend more time with his family and concentrate on his overall health. Apple proceeded to give Liu the standard two-week departure period, in which he is still granted access to the company-issued laptop.

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During this period is where Liu allegedly messed up, as Apple reviewed his laptop activity during this period and found, "Mr. Liu's Apple-issued work laptop showed that he was not honest about his stated reason for leaving Apple." Notably, the lawsuit states Liu was secretly offered a job from Snap on October 18, 2024, and the position he was offered, according to Apple, was "substantially similar" to his job at Apple.

The lawsuit states that Liu would not have been given access to the company-issued laptop if he had been truthful about his reason for leaving Apple for Snap. Apple alleges Liu copied "more than a dozen folders containing thousands of files" and then copied those files to a personal cloud storage account. The files were then organized into sub-folders labeled "Personal" and "Knowledge".

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These folders allegedly contained company secrets and confidential information regarding Apple products, such as product code names, files, supply chain management documents, and more. Apple's lawsuit then adds that Liu took additional steps to attempt to conceal his theft of the files by deleting the stolen documents from his laptop.

What does Apple want out of this lawsuit? Everything. Apple is demanding a jury trial on a single count of breach of contract under a confidentiality and intellectual property agreement Liu signed when he joined the company. Moreover, Apple is seeking to force Liu to return all of the stolen data, pay any damages the court determines to be just, and reimburse Apple for any attorney fees.