Apple has sued a startup for allegedly stealing trade secrets to build a competing chip lineup. The company filed a lawsuit late last week in California, naming the Santa Clara-based Rivos as well as two former Apple employees, Bhasi Kaithamana and Ricky Wen. It claims the company mounted a “coordinated campaign” to attract Apple employees and encourage them to copy confidential documents before leaving, violating their contract with Apple.
The case pits one of the biggest tech companies against a much newer rival, which Apple claims gained an unfair advantage by poaching dozens of its employees to get access to internal files.
Rivos was founded in May 2021 and has operated for months in stealth mode, hiring employees from several major tech companies. Apple says that included more than 40 of its engineers, many of whom were familiar with Apple’s system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs. But in addition to simply having general knowledge of SoCs like the M1 and A15, the suit alleges Rivos encouraged employees to copy troves of work-related documents before leaving.
“Rivos began a coordinated campaign to target Apple employees with access to Apple proprietary and trade secret information about Apple’s SoC designs,” it claims, hoping to gain an unfair advantage. Rivos didn’t reply to a request for comment on the suit.
Kaithamana and Wen, the individual employees named in the suit, were both longtime Apple engineers....
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