Apple Files Lawsuit Against Stealth Startup Rivos Alleging Trade Secret Theft

Apple has filed a lawsuit against stealth startup Rivos, alleging the company is running a coordinated campaign to poach Apple employees with access to trade secret information about its SoC designs.

Currently Rivos is hiring for nearly eighty positions on Lever including jobs in platform engineering, silicon engineering, and system security.

The lawsuit was filed on April 29, 2022 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose Division. It's being brought against Rivos and current Rivos employees Wen Shih-Chieh a/k/a Ricky Wen and Bhasi Kaithamana.


Apple says the action is necessary to "prevent Rivos and its employees from exploiting Apple’s most valuable trade secrets to compete with Apple unlawfully and unfairly."

Here are some of Apple's allegations...

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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.

After accepting their offers from Rivos, some of these employees took gigabytes of sensitive SoC specifications and design files during their last days of employment with Apple. Some used multiple USB storage drives to offload material to personal devices, accessed Apple’s most proprietary specifications stored within collaboration applications, and used AirDrop to transfer files to personal devices. Others saved voluminous presentations on existing and unreleased Apple SoCs—marked Apple Proprietary and Confidential—to their personal cloud storage drives. One even made a full Time Machine backup of his entire Apple device onto a personal external drive. Apple has reason to believe that Rivos instructed at least some of these individuals to download and install apps for encrypted communications before conducting further conversations. And several of the employees deleted information or wiped their Apple devices entirely to try to cover their tracks, later falsely representing to Apple that they had not done so.
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Apple's complaint alleges Breach of Contract, as well as, violation of the Defend Trade Secrets
Act (18 U.S.C. § 1836 et seq.). The company is demanding a trial by jury.

Apple Inc vs Rivos, Inc is case number 5:22-cv-2637. Please download the iClarified app or follow iClarified on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and RSS for updates.