An engineer who stole trade secrets from Intel and shared them with his new bosses at Microsoft was sentenced Tuesday to two years of probation and ordered to pay a fine of more than $34,000.

Varun Gupta, now 45, had worked as a product marketing engineer for Intel from July 2010 to January 2020 before leaving for Microsoft.

“In an industry with high turnover and where employees regularly move to competitors, such behavior cannot be excused and must be deterred,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Narus wrote in a sentencing memo. “Not only did the defendant take proprietary materials with him, he also used those materials during negotiations against his prior employer.”

Gupta copied thousands of files containing proprietary material from his Intel computer to a portable hard drive and “

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