Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

MacRumors

macrumors bot
Original poster
Apr 12, 2001
69,114
40,138


Apple has levied a lawsuit against RISC-V startup Rivos, a company that has hired several former high-ranking engineers from Apple. Rivos describes itself as a "startup in stealth mode," and according to Apple, Rivos not only poached Apple employees, but also stole chip trade secrets.

new-m1-chip.jpg

As noted by Reuters, the lawsuit that was filed last Friday accuses Rivos of hiring more than 40 former Apple employees over the course of the past year to work on system-on-chip (SoC) technology that competes with Apple's own A-series and M-series chips.

Apple claims that at least two former engineers (Bhasi Kaithamana and Wen Shih-Chieh, aka "Ricky") took "gigabytes of sensitive SoC specifications and design files" during their last few days working at Apple. Rivos is accused of launching a "coordinated campaign" to target employees with information about Apple's SoC designs.
"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 employees who allegedly stole information are said to have used USB drives and AirDrop to offload sensitive Apple material to their own personal devices, as well as steal presentations on unreleased SoCs and save them to their cloud accounts. Apple believes that Rivos communicated with some employees through encrypted messaging apps, and the former Apple workers who allegedly participated in the theft of information attempted to wipe their Apple devices to try to cover their tracks.

In the lawsuit, Apple said that it had no choice but to sue because of the volume of information taken, the nature of the information stolen, and that the employees are "now performing the same duties for a competitor with ongoing access to some of Apple's most valuable trade secrets."

Kaithamana, one of the specific employees accused of data theft, allegedly copied thousands of Apple documents containing "proprietary and trade secret information" over the course of a week in August 2021. He copied the files on his work computer before transferring them to a USB drive, and Apple's lawsuit goes into detail about the specific data that he collected.

Wen, a second employee that allegedly stole info, transferred 390 gigabytes of data from his Apple-issued computer to a personal hard drive just before departing the company. Apple says that he stole information on both current and unreleased SoCs, accessing proprietary data just before the file transfer.
Between July 26, 2021 and July 29, 2021, Mr. Wen transferred approximately 390 gigabytes from his Apple-issued computer to a personal external hard drive. Among the data transferred are confidential Apple documents describing Apple trade secrets, including aspects of the microarchitecture for Apple's past, current, and unreleased SoCs.
Other Apple employees not specifically named in the lawsuit also connected external hard drives to their Apple-issued computers shortly after being hired by Rivos, and at the same time, were accessing Apple trade secret information about SoC designs.

Apple is asking for an injunction against the employees who joined Rivos to prevent them from continuing to leak sensitive data, compensation for the loss caused by trade secret misappropriation, and additional damages for "unjust enrichment" Rivos gained from Apple's data. In lieu of damages, Apple is asking for "a reasonable royalty rate" from Rivos. Apple has requested a jury trial, so we are likely to hear more from the Apple v. Rivos dispute going forward.

For those interested, the full lawsuit can be read over on Scribd.

Article Link: Apple Sues SoC Startup Rivos for Poaching Employees and Stealing Trade Secrets
 
Last edited:
In the lawsuit, Apple said that it had no choice but to sue because of the volume of information taken, the nature of the information stolen, and that the employees are "now performing the same duties for a competitor with ongoing access to some of Apple's most valuable trade secrets."

Kaithamana, one of the specific employees accused of data theft, allegedly copied thousands of Apple documents containing "proprietary and trade secret information" over the course of a week in August 2021. He copied the files on his work computer before transferring them to a USB drive, and Apple's lawsuit goes into detail about the specific data that he collected.
I hope the employees that stole get what they desire.
 
Those employees if proven are going to go to jail for a long time. Apple will make sure they end up in a Russian prison at this rate


Also Apple is being reasonable , they are not asking the company to be shut down , they are asking for royalties for using its tech
It’s a civil lawsuit. It’s not a criminal trial. There is no jail time for civil lawsuits.
 
I’m not saying that taking gigabytes of protected data is excusable.

But I think apple really out to take a look at themselves and their work environments when they continue to have an issue of high-level employees jumping ship and sabotaging the company. Happy employees that want for nothing don’t do this sort of thing.
 
Sounds like they have strong forensic evidence, and it makes me wonder how these engineers could have been so careless. I'm guessing the royalties will be signficant, considering they have this company by the short hairs. If there were NDAs, which I'm guessing Apple has 100% of its employees sign, then this is a slam dunk case for Apple.
 
I’m not saying that taking gigabytes of protected data is excusable.

But I think apple really out to take a look at themselves and their work environments when they continue to have an issue of high-level employees jumping ship and sabotaging the company. Happy employees that want for nothing don’t do this sort of thing.
Again this myth. Apple is not losing its employees at a higher rate than other companies.
 
It’s a civil lawsuit. It’s not a criminal trial. There is no jail time for civil lawsuits.
specifics are
  • Breach of Contract
  • Violation of the Defend Trade Secrets
After accepting their offers from Rivos, some of these employees took gigabytes of sensitive SoC specifications and design files during their last days of employment with Apple. 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. 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. Apple has reason to believe that Rivos instructed at least some of these individuals to download and install apps for encrypted communications before conducting further conversations. And several of the employees deleted information or wiped their Apple devices entirely to try to cover their tracks, later falsely representing to Apple that they had not done so.
 
I’m not saying that taking gigabytes of protected data is excusable.

But I think apple really out to take a look at themselves and their work environments when they continue to have an issue of high-level employees jumping ship and sabotaging the company. Happy employees that want for nothing don’t do this sort of thing.
I highly doubt sabotaging the company was because they were unhappy. Given the number of employees being accused and the similar tactics, it’s pretty clear they were systematically paid to grab the data before quitting. People jump ship all the time for a better paid position in the valley. No one in their right mind would steal confidential data unless they got something out of it.
 
while Apple builds a campus in San Diego CA whose sole purpose is to poach Qualcomm engineers
It’s a totally different thing if the Qualcomm guys they hire take gigabytes of internal data with them. That’s just plain ol’ unethical on the part of the departing employees, and, if the new firm encourages this behavior, then that makes them culpable under law. (Not sure if the latter is what’s going on, but it kinda sounds like it. I suppose if the startup deliberately picked engineers they believed would be likely to exfiltrate data, even without direct instruction to do so, that would make them culpable, too.)
 
Stealing is not right, whether it is against Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, or Google. No matter which company's trade secrets are stolen, there should be strong punishments to set an example, and to prevent others from even thinking about doing something like this in the future.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.