Yahoo Autos Self-Driving Truck Start-Up Faces Espionage Investigation Over China Connection
TuSimple develops self-driving software for trucking companies, but it might not be keeping those big-brained developments here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Members of a U.S. national-security panel are urging the Justice Department to bring charges against two of TuSimple’s founders and the company’s current CFO for patents being improperly transferred to China-based startup, Hydron.
TuSimple is best known for taking a load of melons on a 1,200-mile journey — 950 of those miles driven autonomously — across four states in the American southwest in 2021. The company seemed to hold a lot of promise in the self-driving tech space until multiple federal organizations began to look closely at the company and, in particular, TuSimple’s founders Xiaodi Hou and Mo Chen and current Chief Executive Cheng Lu.
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The feds first became concerned with TuSimple when a Chinese national and shareholder bought a huge stake in the company, controlling two board member seats. They then took a closer look at one of Chen’s other companies, centered in China, Hydron.
Members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as Cfius, made a recommendation for criminal charges against the company to the Justice Department. Cfius is headed by the Treasury Department and contains representatives from multiple federal agencies, including Defense and Justice departments. Cfius began investigating TuSimple in 2021 for possible economic espionage charges, the Wall Street Journal reports. The investigation honed in on a startup in China, that different stated goals than TuSimple, but many of the same officers and employees:
