While U.S. officials debate ways to license the sale of certain technologies to Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, massive amounts of technology continue to flow out of U.S. technology companies through illegal means. The latest case in point is Tesla. The news broke in March after I had completed “The New Art of War: China’s Deep Strategy Inside the United States,” and is just now coming to my attention.
Tesla filed a lawsuit in San Francisco federal court alleging that an engineer, Guangzhi Cao, copied more than 300,000 files related to the source code of Autopilot, which is Tesla’s system for autonomous driving. He knew he was going to be working for China’s Xiaopeng Motors technology company, where he started in January. Xiaopeng naturally says it did not know that Cao had stolen the technology, a claim that rings hollow. He most likely was hired precisely because he was bringing a key technology to China, where the development of autonomous vehicles is a national priority established by the central government in Beijing.
Xiaopeng employs at least five former Tesla employees, the company said in the lawsuit.
As I write in The New Art of War, Chinese engineers and scientists working in the United States are recruited by government officials in charge of developing certain technologies, such as semiconductors or supercomputers. It’s all part of a program called Thousand Talents. It’s perfectly legal and within international norms to attempt to recruit one’s own nationals who have gone to the United States to study and to conduct research. What’s different in China’s case is that it is organized and carried out on a massive scale.
The line of illegality is when one of these scientists or engineers copies corporate documents containing technological secrets, which Cao is alleged to have done in this case. U.S. companies need to wake up and realize that Chinese entities are still engaged in a massive campaign to obtain their secrets either through computer hacking or through human means. We are never going to be able to respond to China’s competitive challenge if we cannot control our own technology.
