"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.
It shared that feat and others achieved on U.S. highways with its partners in China, according to hundreds of pages of previously unreported company correspondence viewed by the Journal.
Within a year and a half, TuSimple voluntarily shut down its U.S. operations, auctioned off its trucks and delisted from the Nasdaq. Its leaders moved hundreds of millions of dollars raised from U.S. investors from the company's accounts to China, according to legal documents, and started new business ventures.
The story of TuSimple's technology transfer and the political imbroglio that followed laid bare weaknesses in U.S. laws aimed at facilitating foreign investment while protecting U.S. know-how. It is now informing a transformation of how the U.S. polices companies with Chinese ties.
In February, President Trump told his administration to stop using a particular type of agreement intended to monitor the behavior of risky companies. That is in part because his advisers had been so frustrated by the scope of intellectual property TuSimple was able to export to China, people familiar with the matter said.
The TuSimple case also helped shape new Commerce Department rules prohibiting sales of internet-connected cars and car components that have ties to China, according to a person familiar with the matter. Similar rules for commercial vehicles are coming.
Documents viewed by the Journal show how TuSimple shared with Chinese partners data that amounted to the design of an American-made autonomous driving system.
They show the sharing continued between when TuSimple signed a national-security agreement in February 2022, and its deadline to comply six months later.
That agreement ordered TuSimple to separate its business and technology from China-based employees and partners with firewalls and governance controls, and to prevent the sharing of intellectual property. It was enforced by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or Cfius, an interagency national-security panel.
A Cfius investigation determined that TuSimple's tech sharing hadn't violated the agreement, but it fined the company for other infractions, according to a person with knowledge of the events. TuSimple paid a $6 million settlement without admitting fault.
TuSimple co-founder Xiaodi Hou, who left the company in 2023, said no information prohibited by the company's national-security agreement "was ever shared with anyone."
Hou and Mo Chen co-founded TuSimple a decade ago with money from Charles Chao, who runs a Chinese media empire called Sina. They built much of the company in the U.S. TuSimple in 2021 raised $1.4 billion and signed business deals with the United Parcel Service, Volkswagen and Navistar International.
As TuSimple gained momentum in the U.S., Chen founded another startup in China called Hydron that said it had plans to build hydrogen-powered trucks for TuSimple. Hydron, also funded by tens of millions from Sina, according to people familiar with the matter, had few operations of its own and shared employees and an office with TuSimple in Beijing.
Hydron in late 2021 struck an agreement to develop autonomous driving trucks with Foton in a deal negotiated by TuSimple, according to a document seen by the Journal. Foton is a subsidiary of China state-owned BAIC Group, which has an agreement with a Chinese military university to work on driverless technology. BAIC and Foton didn't respond to requests for comment.
One email, Slack message and videoconference at a time, TuSimple sent Chinese partners technical instructions for server dimensions, brake designs, sensors, steering, power supply and chips, according to documents seen by the Journal.
In the Beijing office shared by TuSimple and Hydron, employees routinely downloaded the autonomy source code developed in the U.S. through joint access to a repository, former employees said.
Hou said TuSimple never shared protected information with Hydron and isn't aware of any plan to collaborate with Foton. Documents seen by the Journal show TuSimple's staff communicating frequently with Foton.
At times, TuSimple shared technology developed with American partners, including Navistar. A spokesman for Navistar, now International Motors, declined to comment. Han and Chen didn't respond to requests for comment.
Cfius representatives visited TuSimple in April 2022 and concluded it hadn't violated its agreement, according to people familiar with the matter. Later that year, Cfius members referred company leadership to the Justice Department for possible trade-secrets theft and economic espionage charges.
The U.S. government across administrations has identified maintaining the U.S.'s superiority over China in technology as a pressing national-security priority. But autonomous driving systems aren't explicitly covered by export controls, and foreign-investment reviews and criminal investigations have provided limited protection.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Securities and Exchange Commission opened investigations into TuSimple's relationship with Hydron in 2022. The following year, the Commerce Department intercepted an attempt by TuSimple to ship Nvidia artificial-intelligence chips out of the country and launched an investigation.
In a recent public filing, TuSimple said it had reached an agreement on a settlement with the SEC that awaited commission approval. The status of the other investigations couldn't be learned.
A law firm hired by TuSimple's board to investigate dealings with Hydron reported finding evidence of deep and longstanding ties with the Chinese company, according to a document seen by the Journal.
Hou is making another run at self-driving trucks with a new company in Texas, Bot Auto, staffed with former TuSimple employees, including Han, and funded partly with Chinese capital. Hou, a U.S. citizen, said no foreign entity has a controlling or majority stake." [1]
1. Startup Shared Self-Drive Secrets With China. Somerville, Heather. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 28 May 2025: A1.
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