The “ has taken another exciting twist this week as it’s been uncovered that an engineer working on the secret project stole trade secrets from the iPhone maker.

, Xiaolang Zhang has pled guilty to taking trade secrets from Apple when he departed the company in 2018. Zhang had previously worked on a self-driving car project with Apple, before leaving the California-based company to work for Technology, also known as XPeng.

, the company found that he had “transferred around 24GB of ‘highly problematic’ data to his wife’s laptop via AirDrop.” Zhang also reportedly took circuit boards and a server from Apple’s autonomous vehicle lab. The Verge reports:

“The terms of Zhang’s plea agreement aren’t publicly available, but according to a court document uploaded by CNBC (pdf), Zhang pled guilty to the single theft of trade secrets count listed in his indictment.

“A conference to determine his sentencing is scheduled for November 14th. According to US law, theft of trade secrets comes with a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, and CNBC reports Zhang could face up to a quarter-million-dollar fine.”

What’s interesting about this case is that it’s that it is in fact working on a self-driving car.

Sure, its tech on the road, and rumors swirl about who might build the Apple car, but the iPhone maker itself always remains tight-lipped about any future products.

This is now the second time Apple has been forced to show its car-building hand in this way. In 2019, another engineer was found to have smuggled details about .

According to The Verge, Jizhong Chen was charged with attempting to smuggle details such as manuals, schematics, diagrams and photographs out of Apple’s labs.