Apple has filed a lawsuit against a former senior product design engineer, alleging he stole trade secrets related to the company’s $3,500 Vision Pro headset.
The case was filed on June 24, 2025 in Santa Clara County Superior Court. It accuses Di Liu—a Chinese national living in San Jose, who was employed by Apple from September 2017 until November 2024 and had a senior role in the Vision Products Group—of breaching his confidentiality and intellectual property agreement by taking thousands of files containing proprietary information about the Vision Pro, and other unreleased Apple technologies, during his final days at the company.
According to Apple, Liu told colleagues he was resigning from the company for personal and health reasons, but “a review of Mr. Liu’s Apple-issued work laptop showed that he was not honest about his stated reason for leaving Apple.” The suit alleges Liu “negotiated a position with Snap Inc.,” which makes its own augmented-reality glasses called Spectacles, and “received an offer of employment on October 18, which means he waited nearly two weeks until October 30 to notify Apple that he was resigning from his position with Apple. And even then, he did not disclose he was leaving for Snap.”
“Apple would not have allowed Mr. Liu continued access had he told the truth,” the suit said.
During that two-week period, Liu allegedly used his Apple-issued laptop and credentials to access and copy a “massive volume” of confidential documents to his personal cloud storage, including design schematics, R&D records, supply-chain data, and files with internal codenames, many marked as “Apple confidential.” Furthermore, Liu is alleged to have deliberately renamed, reorganized, and then deleted files from his company laptop to cover his tracks, according to the lawsuit.
Apple contends Liu’s actions were intentional and calculated to benefit his new role at Snap, where he now works as a product design engineer on AR hardware, according to his Linkedin profile.
Apple is seeking damages, as well as a court order requiring Liu to return all proprietary materials; it’s also calling for all his devices and cloud accounts to be inspected by forensic examiners.
Snap is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, and Apple is not accusing Snapchat’s parent company of wrongdoing, but the suit does say Liu’s actions may have potentially given it an unfair leg-up in the spatial-computing market. Snap last month announced it will debut new lightweight Spectacles with more immersive experiences starting next year.
Apple and Snap did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
Apple has a long history of aggressively defending its intellectual property—and taking legal actions against former employees accused of leaking or stealing trade secrets.
Apple’s Vision Pro, which debuted in February 2024 with a $3,500 price tag, reportedly generated between $1.3 and $1.6 billion in revenue for the company last year—impressive for a new product category, but modest by Apple’s lofty standards nonetheless.
That said, Apple is plowing ahead: Long-time analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has deep connections within Apple’s supply chain, recently published a report outlining an ambitious roadmap for the Vision Pro, revealing Apple currently has at least seven projects in development.
According to the report, Apple is planning a major push in 2027 with the release of the Vision Air—a significantly lighter, more affordable headset—as well as a pair of Ray-Ban-like smart glasses focused on audio, photography, and AI-powered environmental awareness.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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