Apple is suing Rivos under the Theft of Secrets case

Rivos, a company, has been sued by Apple for allegedly stealing trade secrets about its A15 and M1 system-on-chips. The company is still in stealth mode, but it has employed…

By Nivedita Bangari

May 3, 2022

2 min read

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Rivos, a company, has been sued by Apple for allegedly stealing trade secrets about its A15 and M1 system-on-chips. The company is still in stealth mode, but it has employed over 40 Apple engineers in the last year and allegedly urged some of them to take gigabytes of classified data with them.

Rivos was created in June 2021 to develop system-on-chips to compete with Apple and other companies. According to Reuters, the startup purportedly aimed to poach as many Apple employees as possible and has acquired around 40 engineers from the Cupertino, California-based computer giant.

Rivos is a stealthy firm, therefore it’s unclear what kind of SoCs it plans to develop. Given the nature of A15 and M1, we can assume the company is interested in the smartphone and PC sectors. At least two former Apple employees are accused of stealing thousands of files about the A15 and M1 SoC designs, as well as other trade secrets, according to Apple

Rivos allegedly targeted Apple developers with access to gigabytes of confidential material and requested them to download it to flash drives

Apple believes that using its trade secrets and A15 and M1 designs might dramatically speed up Rivos SoC development and give the business an unfair edge over other processor designers, including Apple. To that end, Apple is requesting that the court prohibit Rivos from using its highly sensitive proprietary data, recover its property, and pay an undisclosed amount in damages.

“Apple has reason to believe that Rivos instructed at least some Apple employees to download and install apps for encrypted communications (e.g., the Signal app) before communicating with them further,” the complaint by Apple reads.

This isn’t the first time Apple has filed a lawsuit against one of its former workers. It sued Gerrard Williams III and his colleagues last year, alleging that they formed Nuvia to develop data center SoCs with the best performance-per-watt characteristics.

The case is scheduled for trial in October 2023. Nuvia was later purchased by Qualcomm, which intends to leverage Nuvia’s CPU ideas in its notebook SoCs while stating that it has no plans to manufacture data center processors.