The self-driving truck startup that siphoned trade secrets to Chinese companies

A week after one of America’s largest self-driving truck companies promised the U.S. government it would stop sharing sensitive technology with Chinese partners, TuSimple, transferred a trove of data to a Beijing-owned firm.

“They want a lot of details,” Xiaoling Han, a U.S.-based TuSimple Holdings employee, said to a colleague. A leading Chinese commercial-truck manufacturer, Foton, sought the data from TuSimple’s many test drives around Texas. “It is pretty time consuming,” Han wrote in a February 2022 chat exchange seen by The Wall Street Journal.

TuSimple was a leader in the global race to develop self-driving trucks that could solve chronic driver shortages, make freight hauling cheaper and bolster military operations. Founded by two Chinese entrepreneurs with money from a Chinese business mogul, the San Diego-based company set a record when its truck traveled 80 miles in Arizona without a human driver.

Read more at Wall Street Journal