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AFP
Anthony Levandowski was dismissed by Uber
The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has filed criminal charges against a former senior engineer at Google’s owner Alphabet alleging he took company secrets to taxi company Uber.
Anthony Levandowski was charged with 33 counts of trade theft involving Alphabet’s self-driving car technology.
He had left Alphabet’s Waymo unit in 2016 and eventually ran Uber’s self-driving car project, only to be fired.
Lawyers for Mr Levandowski, who now runs his own firm, have yet to comment.
Waymo and Uber were involved in a protracted lawsuit, which the taxi company eventually settled in 2018. Mr Levandowski was not party to that case, and did not publicly comment on the allegations.
The claim is that before leaving Waymo, Mr Levandowski downloaded thousands of files in 2015 related to Alphabet’s self-driving car technology, including details related to Lidar, a crucial sensor technology for self-driving cars.
“All of us have the right to change jobs, none of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door,” US Attorney David Anderson said in a release announcing 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. “Theft is not innovation.”
In the 2018 settlement, which underlined technology companies’ race to lead the market in autonomous technology, Uber promised not to use Alphabet’s technology and to give Waymo a 0.34% stake in Uber.
Mr Levandowski, aged 39, faces up to 10 years in jail and could be fined $250,000 per count, $8.25m in total.
He was a founding member of the group that started Google’s self-driving car project. Mr Levandowski left Google in early 2016 to launch his own self-driving software start-up called Otto, which was later acquired by Uber.