A former Tesla Inc. engineer being sued by the company admitted in a court filing earlier this week that he uploaded source code for Tesla’s Autopilot to the cloud, but he denies any wrongdoing.

The case involves Guangzhi Cao, a former engineer who left Tesla in January to work for Chinese electric car startup Guangzhou Xiaopeng Motors Technology Co. Ltd. Tesla, which sued Cao in March, said in its filing that he worked on the “crown jewel of Tesla’s intellectual property portfolio.”

Tesla alleged he began uploading thousands of files after Xiaopeng offered him the role of “head of perception” in November 2018. The amount of data involved is substantial, with Tesla claiming that Cao uploaded more than 300,000 files and directories related to and including the Autopilot source code.

The unexpected defense is that Cao admitted to uploading the information to his personal iCloud account but claims he deleted the data before he left Tesla and never shared the code with Xiaopeng, hence was not involved in trade theft as alleged in the lawsuit.

Cao is not the first Xiaopeng employee to have been accused of stealing trade secrets from a former employer. In a similar case, former Apple Inc. engineer Xiaolang Zhang was charged by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 2018 with stealing confidential information from Apple’s self-driving car project.

As with Cao, Zhang was accused of stealing trade secrets to take to Xiaopeng. Seemingly the only difference between the two cases is that the FBI had enough evidence to charge Zhang, whereas the case against Cao is entirely private litigation by Tesla.

Xiaopeng, which has a development office in Mountain View, California, has denied any involvement in both the Apple and Tesla cases, with chairman He Xiaopeng calling the Tesla lawsuit “questionable.”

Both the Tesla and Apple cases are a timely reminder that of the risk insiders present companies, Jeff Nathan, principal researcher at security management platform Exabeam Inc. told SiliconANGLE.

“Insiders with access to privileged information represent a great risk to a company’s security,” he said. “Tesla is not alone. Managing cloud applications and services is an ongoing and common challenge for enterprises. With more enterprises deploying critical resources within their cloud services, the threat landscape can extend to a larger attack surface that could be outside of security’s traditional span of control.”

Photo: Harani0403/ Wikimedia Commons