Ex-Uber and Waymo engineer charged with trade secrets theft - Los Angeles Times

Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski is being charged with stealing closely guarded secrets about self-driving cars. He has been accused of later selling those secrets to Uber as the ride-hailing giant scrambled to catch up in the high-stakes race to build robotic vehicles.

The indictment filed Tuesday by the U.S. attorney’s office in San Jose is an offshoot of a lawsuit filed in 2017 by Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer spun off from Google. Uber agreed to pay Waymo $245 million to settle the case, but the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit made an unusual recommendation to open a criminal investigation.

Uber has considered acquiring self-driving technology crucial for its survival.

Levandowski, a pioneer in robotic vehicles, was charged with 33 counts of trade secrets theft. He could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison and fined $250,000 per count.

Prosecutors say the investigation is ongoing, but they wouldn’t say whether Uber and its founder and former Chief Executive Travis Kalanick are targets. Prosecutors say Google and Uber cooperated in the investigation.

Levandowski was accused of stealing years of top-secret information from Google, which prosecutors called the crown jewels of the company. That included Google’s breakthroughs in lidar, a key piece of technology that enables self-driving cars to detect what’s around them.

Levandowski’s attorneys said he is innocent. “He didn’t steal anything, from anyone,” they said Tuesday in a statement. “This case rehashes claims already discredited in a civil case that settled more than a year.”

Prosecutors say Levandowski turned himself in earlier Tuesday.

Although Tuesday’s indictment didn’t charge Uber, it’s a stain for a company that has been trying to recover from a series of scandals that led up to Kalanick’s exit two years ago. In addition to trying to reverse perceptions that it’s a technological thief, Uber has been dealing with fallout from its own acknowledgment of rampant sexual harassment, its use of software designed to dupe regulators and a yearlong cover-up of a hacking attack that stole the personal information of 57 million passengers and 600,000 drivers.

The case seems unlikely to endear Uber to investors who are already skeptical about the company’s ability to make money after piling up billions of dollars of losses. The lack of profits is the main reason the company’s shares have fallen about 25% below the price set during its much-ballyhooed initial public stock offering in May.

During the Waymo trial, Kalanick conceded that Uber needed to develop self-driving cars to survive. But he denied that he resorted to stealing technology from Google. He said he believed Google was an ally until he began to suspect the company intended to launch its own ride-hailing service consisting entirely of its robotic vehicles.

But Kalanick also testified that his push to build a fleet of self-driving cars for Uber led him to woo Levandowski. The two men began talking in 2015 before Levandowski left Google. After he left, Uber paid $680 million in 2016 to acquire Otto, a self-driving truck start-up founded by Levandowski and another former Google employee, Lior Ron.

Waymo, which spun off from Google in 2016, alleged that Levandowski downloaded 14,000 documents containing its trade secrets before he left the company to found Otto. Uber denied knowing anything about those documents, but eventually fired him after he repeatedly asserted his constitutional right against self-incrimination leading up to the trial.

The whiff of potential wrongdoing became even more pungent following the disclosure of allegations by a former Uber security specialist, Richard Jacobs, that the company employed an espionage team to spy on Waymo and other rivals while creating ways to conceal any stolen technology.

Google also pursued a separate case against Levandowski in arbitration proceedings, which resulted in a panel ordering Levandowski to pay the company $127 million, according to disclosure made by Uber leading up to its IPO. Uber may be held liable for paying all or part of that as part of guarantees it made in its Otto acquisition, but believes it may be able to get out of those obligations.

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https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-27/ex-google-engineer-anthony-levandowski-is-charged-with-trade-secrets-theft

2019-08-27 18:57:00Z
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