Uber’s former head of autonomous vehicles Anthony Levandowski has been charged with theft of trade secrets and criminal forfeiture after being accused of stealing information from Google, The Daily Beast reported.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office accused Levandowski of downloading more than 14,000 files related to Google’s self-driving car division Waymo, “including critical engineering information, schematics, and other drawings.” Levandowksi allegedly downloaded the material to his personal laptop in December 2015 before leaving Google and starting at Uber the following year.
The case has been under FBI investigation since May 2017. According to The Daily Beast, FBI Special Agent John F. Bennett called the case “a very tasty theft” that includes “all the underlying research, planning, and technology” from Google’s self-driving work.
Levandowski left Google after eight years with the company before starting his own self-driving company, Otto. He joined Uber as a vice president of engineering in 2016 after the company bought Otto for nearly $700 million. He was fired from Uber in 2017, before going on to start another autonomous vehicle company, Pronto. Levandowski will no longer serve as Pronto’s CEO following the recent charges.
A Pronto spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the charges are exclusively against Levandowski and “do not in any way involve Pronto’s ground-breaking technology.”
His lawyers claim Levandowski was authorized to download the material before he left Google, and that the files were not transferred to Uber after the ride-sharing giant purchased Otto.
“We are all free to move from job to job,” U.S. Attorney David Anderson said during a press conference on Tuesday. “What we can’t do is stuff our pockets on the way out the door.”
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