Apple sues startup, accuses it of poaching staff and stealing Apple Silicon trade secrets

Apple has filed a lawsuit against Rivos Inc, a tech startup company that works to design and market their own system-on-chips, which makes them a potential rival to Apple’s own Apple Silicon. According to Apple, Rivos Inc has been running a ‘coordinated campaign’ to target Apple staff with access to Apple information about its latest SoC designs.

Rivos Inc is currently operating in ‘stealth mode’, which is to say that they’re operating under the radar. Their website for instance doesn’t reveal much other that they’re hiring, though they do list their office building’s address which happens to be an office building that they share with Blackberry Corperate. They were founded in May 2021, and began recruiting Apple staff by June 2021 with over 40 of them now at Rivos Inc.

“‘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,” – Apple lawsuit

Apple also named two figures in the lawsuit, which are Bhasi Kaithamana and Ricky Wen. Both of them are former Apple CPU designers dealing with their system-on-chips, with Kaithamana having spent 8 years at Apple from 2013 to 2021 while Wen was there even longer, from 2008 till 2021. Apple named them both in the lawsuit together with Rivos Inc and claims that they had downloaded and transferred files containing information regarding Apple’s proprietary and trade secret chip designs to an external drive. Kaithamana is now Rivos Inc’s CPU Implementation Lead while Wen is the startup’s Principal Member of Technical Staff, positions that are extremely similar to their roles at Apple.

Wen in particular had transferred unreleased chip designs and gigabytes of files to his personal Google Drive account including a diagram depicting the architecture of an aspect of an Apple trade secret chip design. Apple also noted that many other ex-Apple staff now at Rivos Inc carried over proprietary Apple information to the startup, and that they tried to hide it by deleting their data from their company devices. They even state that they found instances of an ex-Apple employee who now works for Rivos Inc getting then-Apple staff to sign up for Signal so that they can talk to Rivos Inc’s CTO Belli Kuttanna.

Apple is now requesting in the lawsuit for the courts to stop Rivos from continuing to use their trade secrets and proprietary information as well as asking for their ex-staff to return Apple belongings. They are also asking for an undisclosed amount of damages to be paid. Ultimately, the lawsuit’s goal is to prevent Rivos Inc from artificially accelerating the development of their rivalling system-on-chips using Apple trade secrets.

“Apple welcomes and values open competition and the innovation that can result. But that competition cannot be built on the back of trade secret theft. The sheer volume of information taken, the highly sensitive nature of that information, and the fact that these employees are now performing the same duties for a competitor with ongoing access to some of Apple’s most valuable trade secrets, leave Apple with few alternatives.

If Apple does not act to protect its most sensitive secrets now, Apple could lose trade secret status over them entirely,” – Apple lawsuit

This is just the latest incident in Apple’s ongoing struggle to retain talent. On top of notable figures such as Jony Ive, they’ve also been haemorrhaging engineers and staff for some time now. Just earlier this year for instance, Jeff Wilcox, former Director of Mac System Architecture, left Apple for rival Intel after having spent 8 years at Cupertino. He was one of their star engineers, having played a crucial part in the transition to Apple Silicon with the M1 chip as well as the Apple T2 coprocessor before that.

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