It is a case of industrial espionage that has agitated Silicon Valley for three years now. California justice sentenced Anthony Levandowski to 18 months in prison on Tuesday for stealing manufacturing secrets from Google's autonomous cars, before heading up the competing program of Uber Technologies Inc.
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In 2009, this engineer joined the “ Project Chauffeur ”, Google's autonomous car program, of which he was one of the founding members. He contributed to this project until 2016, when he resigned and left the firm. That same year, the “ Driver ” project became Waymo, a Google subsidiary entirely devoted to autonomous driving software. But as Anthony Levandowski prepares to leave Google, he copies more than 14,000 confidential documents on the manufacture of self-driving cars onto his personal computer. He takes with him development schedules, and especially the plans for the LiDAR system (for Light Detection And Ranging), a crucial system that allows autonomous cars to measure distances and detect obstacles.
After leaving Google, Anthony Levandowski founded Otto, a start-up which designs autonomous heavy goods vehicles. Some eight months later, Uber Technologies Inc. bought Otto for nearly $ 700 million. Within Uber, the engineer is then responsible for overseeing the development of autonomous cars. Its fate changed when in February 2017 Waymo filed a complaint for theft of industrial secrets and patent infringement against Uber and its subsidiary Otto. The famous LiDAR sensors are targeted. Accused of the theft of 14,000 Google documents, Anthony Levandowski was fired by the VTC company in May 2017.
In August 2019, 33 charges were brought against the engineer. Anthony Levandowski only pleads guilty to one of them - the theft of trade secrets - in exchange for abandoning all the others. As part of this arrangement, he admits that he downloaded these documents for his own benefit and that of Uber Technologies Inc. He also claims to be aware of the confidentiality of the information he handled while working for the “ Driver ” project of Google. Finally, he admits that the stolen documents have an estimated value of $ 1.5 million.
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In addition to the 18-month prison sentence, the engineer was also fined $ 95,000 and paid restitution of $ 756,499 to Waymo LLC. He was also sentenced to three years of supervised release. Now 40 years old, Anthony Levandowski will serve his sentence later, on an unknown date, because of the risks associated with Covid-19, the statement from the California Department of Justice said. Judge William Alsup called the case " the biggest theft of trade secrets he has seen, " Reuters reports.
The legal battle between Waymo and Uber continues on another front. Anthony Levandowski owes Waymo $ 179 million. An amount that he believes should be paid by Uber. However, the company refuses to pay this amount. In addition, according to information from TechCrunch, Anthony Levandowski has not said his last word: according to him Uber has not honored part of its commitments in the context of the acquisition of Otto Trucking, he would hope to obtain from the company 4 billions of dollars. The engineer has therefore not finished occupying the legal chronicle in Silicon Valley.
