Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Uber’s self-driving program and an ex-member of the Google Self-Driving Car Project, was indicted by federal authorities for trade secret theft.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Anthony Levandowski, a founding member of Google’s Self-Driving Car team a decade ago, has been indicted by federal authorities for theft of trade secrets from his former employer that triggered a high-profile legal battle between Alphabet’s Waymo and Uber in 2017.
The indictment, unsealed on August 26, alleges Levandowski, 39, downloaded files from internal Google drives months before he resigned from the company related to its laser LiDAR sensor and self-driving car technology. He’s charged with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets and is to be arraigned on the charges today before U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael M. Cousins with the Northern District in San Jose, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Levandowski briefly ran Otto, a robotic truck company he cofounded, weeks after leaving Google in 2016 that was quickly acquired by Uber, after which he was put in charge of its driverless car program. Waymo, commercial successor to the Google Self-Driving Car project, sued Uber for tech theft though it didn’t name Levandowski as a defendant.
Waymo and the ridehailing giant settled the matter in early 2018, with the Alphabet company receiving pre-IPO equity in Uber valued at $245 million. At the time, federal Judge William Alsup also recommended that the U.S. Attorney’s office consider charging Levandowski with stealing trade secrets. Uber fired him in May 2017.
“All of us have the right to change jobs,” said U.S. Attorney David Anderson. “None of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door. Theft is not innovation.”
Pronto.ai, a self-driving tech startup Levandowski cofounded in 2018, said he has left that company and was replaced as CEO by cofounder Robbie Miller, its chief safety officer.
“The criminal charges filed against Anthony relate exclusively to lidar and do not in any way involve Pronto’s ground-breaking technology,” Pronto said in a statement. “We are fully supportive of Anthony and his family during this period.”
Waymo said it appreciates the work done by the Justice Department in bringing the indictment. “We have always believed competition should be fueled by innovation,” the company said in a statement.
The legal fight was a huge blow for Uber’s self-driving car dreams, which took a further hit in March 2018 when a test vehicle killed a pedestrian crossing a dark street in Tempe, Arizona. Uber also shut down the remnants of Levandowski’s truck-oriented Otto in 2018.
