Self-driving truck startup Tusimple (now Createai) sent sensitive data (effectively a blueprint for American-made autonomous vehicle systems) to a Beijing-owned company after committing to the US government to halt such relocations, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The transfer to a Chinese truck manufacturer occurred around February 2022. This comes a week after Tusimple signed an agreement in which US regulators ordered businesses to separate business and technology from China-based employees through firewalls and governance control. Data sharing continued until Tusimple’s deadline to comply with the contract six months later, according to hundreds of pages of communication seen by the journal.
Subsequent investigations with the US Foreign Investment Committee (CFIUS) found that data sharing was technically not breaching the contract, but Tusimple was fined for other violations and paid a $6 million settlement without admitting disability.
TechCrunch was unable to reach Createai’s Tusimple now due to comments.
Still, Tusimple’s data transfer saga reveals the limitations of US safeguards aimed at balancing foreign investment and national security. And it’s not just the data that Tusimple is trying to cross borders.
This latest revelation comes eight months after TechCrunch reported that some of Tusimple’s shareholders were trying to block the company’s US funds (at the time around $450 million) from transferring it to a Chinese subsidiary. The drama, as one of Tusimple’s co-founder Xiaodi Hou, still fights in court to manage his voting stock, allowing him to advance the company’s liquidation. In December 2024, Tusimple was officially rebranded to Createai.
The company has been caught up in controversy since it was released via an IPO in 2021. Tusimple began in 2015 as a China-backed startup founded by entrepreneurs Hou and Lu Chen with ties to Sina Corp. Public highways.
Tusimple’s plans got worse amid the internal struggles over the company’s relationship with China and federal investigations, leading to the decision to withdraw its US business and the decision to voluntarily withdraw from the stock market in January 2024. The goal was to resume the autonomous driving business in China, but both the CFIUS contract and other courts banned the company from transferring.
The Journal report shed light on previously reported controversy about Hydron, a Chinese hydrogen trucking startup founded by Chen, and shared an office with Tusimple China. The overlap between Hydron and Tusimple was the subject of the 2022 CFIUS probe. Meanwhile, Tusimple revealed that employees spent time working at Hydron in 2021, sharing confidential information with the company.
According to the document, Tusimple negotiated a contract between Hydron and Foton in 2021 to develop an autonomous truck, according to the journal seen by the journal. Foton, a subsidiary of the state-owned BAIC Group, has agreed with Chinese military universities to tackle AV Tech.
For each journal, we sent our partners technical instructions for server dimensions, brake design, sensors, steering, power supply and chips through a combination of email, slack messages and video calls. Employees also regularly downloaded the autonomous source code developed by their American counterparts.
As geopolitical tensions and competition with China rise, Tsusui’s ties serve as a warning story for Washington that will drive change in US policy, encourage stricter rules on China-related technology transactions, and promote a wider push to block high-risk transactions entirely.
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