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 technical feat and others achieved on American 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.

Full exclusive : Documents reveal that self-driving truck startup TuSimple transferred critical autonomous driving tech and data to Chinese partners despite a 2022 agreement with CFIUS.