Apple sues startup for poaching its engineers in order to steal secret info

“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.”

What you need to know

Apple is suing a ‘stealth mode’ startup by the name of Rivos.
The company says Rivos has been poaching Apple’s engineers and using them to steal information.
It is alleged that employees took gigabytes of sensitive information about chips.

A new lawsuit filed by Apple alleges that a startup by the name of Rivos poached Apple engineers from the company and that those employees took gigabytes of sensitive information with them.

In a lawsuit filed Friday Apple claimed:

“Stealth mode” startup Rivos, which was founded to design and market its own competing SoCs, has filled out its ranks with dozens of former Apple engineers. 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 promptly sent Rivos a letter informing Rivos of the confidentiality obligations of Apple’s former employees, but Rivos never responded.

The suit goes on to say that, on accepting their offers, some employees “took gigabytes of sensitive SoC” specifications and design files using USB drives to offload material or AirDrop to transfer files:

“Others saved voluminous presentations on existing and unreleased Apple SoCs—marked Apple Proprietary and Confidential—to their personal cloud storage drives. One even made a full Time Machine backup of his entire Apple device onto a personal external drive.”

The suit alleges that Rivos told employees to install encrypt communications apps before continuing conversations. Apple is seeking damages for “any unjust enrichment” caused by the “misappropriation of the trade secrets” and an injunction against the company, as well as a return of any stolen property.