Apple has filed a lawsuit in California accusing a former engineer of stealing trade secrets related to its Vision Pro headset just before taking a job at Snap. The complaint, filed June 24, targets Di Liu, a senior design engineer who allegedly downloaded thousands of confidential documents to his personal cloud storage during his final days at the company.

Apple, known for its tight grip on internal information, has increasingly used legal channels to address employee leaks. This latest lawsuit reflects the company’s ongoing strategy to protect its proprietary data, particularly in the competitive landscape of augmented reality and wearables.

According to the lawsuit, Liu failed to disclose during his resignation that he was headed to Snap—a direct competitor and maker of smart glasses. Because of this omission, Apple allowed him a standard two-week offboarding period and continued account access, which he allegedly used to extract files from Apple’s secure storage systems.

“Worse still, the review of Mr. Liu’s Apple-issued work laptop also shows that while maintaining access to Apple’s Proprietary Information under false pretenses, he used his Apple credentials to exfiltrate thousands of documents containing Proprietary Information from Apple’s secure file storage systems,” Apple’s lawyers wrote in the filing.

The documents Liu accessed reportedly included codenames, technical specs, product designs, and supply chain details. Apple claims these files were protected under confidentiality agreements signed by Liu when he joined the company in 2017. His role involved working on the Vision Pro headset as a system product design engineer.

Though Apple alleges the stolen information could now aid Liu in his current role at Snap, the tech giant is not suing Snap directly. The company did not respond to requests for comment, and Liu has also remained silent on the matter.

“The overlap between Apple’s Proprietary Information that Mr. Liu retained and Snap’s AR products (for which Mr. Liu is a ‘product design engineer’) suggests that Mr. Liu intends to use Apple’s Proprietary Information at Snap,” the court document states.

Apple is seeking damages and a court order to allow forensic review of Liu’s devices to ensure any stolen data is deleted.

This isn’t the first time Apple has taken legal action against former employees. In 2022, it settled with Simon Lancaster over leaked information to a journalist. Earlier this year, it sued Andrew Aude for similar reasons, though the case was later dismissed after Aude apologized.

The company also reached a settlement with chip startup Rivos in 2024 over allegations of intellectual property theft. Rivos was founded by former Apple semiconductor engineers.

In separate cases, at least three former Apple employees have been charged with leaking trade secrets to organizations linked to China. One of them pled guilty and was sentenced to four months in prison, while two others are still undergoing legal proceedings.