Ex-Google and Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski charged with trade secret theft

Anthony Levandowski, the controversial self-driving car engineer whose shenanigans helped spur a multimillion-dollar lawsuit between Waymo and Uber, was charged by federal prosecutors Tuesday with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets.

The criminal charges from the US Attorney’s Office of Northern District of California mirror complaints made by Waymo, the self-driving division of Alphabet, in the 2018 lawsuit: that Levandowski stole 14,000 documents from Google containing proprietary information about its self-driving cars and downloaded them on to his personal laptop. The charges were first reported by The New York Times.

Shortly after Levandowski left Google, he founded Otto, a self-driving truck startup, which was quickly acquired by Uber for nearly $700 million. Waymo has long argued that Uber wound up with those allegedly stolen files and merely masqueraded the process as an acquisition.

The files that Levandowski is alleged to have stolen contain drawings and schematics pertaining to circuitry and LIDAR laser-sensors that were used in Google’s self-driving cars. If convicted, he faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and $250,000 fine, plus restitution, for every count.

Levandowski has always been an infamous figure in the self-driving car world. During his time at Google, he secretly modified the company’s self-driving software so that the cars could drive on otherwise forbidden routes, according to The New Yorker. During depositions leading up to the Waymo v. Uber trial, Levandowski repeatedly pleaded the Fifth. Uber fired Levandowski in 2017 and settled the lawsuit in February 2018.

For the handful of days the case was on trial, though, lawyers for Waymo painted a picture of Levandowski as a problematic employee who clashed with his boss over their slower, more cautious approach to self-driving cars. New York magazine once attributed Levandowski as saying, “I’m pissed we didn’t have the first death” to a group of Uber engineers after a driver died in a Tesla on Autopilot in 2016. (Levandowski has denied ever saying it.) His words would prove darkly prescient: in March, a self-driving Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona.

Levandowski was fired from Uber in May 2017. The ride-hailing company denied ever receiving the stolen schematics from the controversial engineer, and he later expressed regret about bringing him on board. During the trial, one of Uber’s lawyers said, “All Uber has to show for Anthony Levandowski is this lawsuit.”

Asked to comment on the charges filed against their former vice president, an Uber spokesperson said, “We’ve cooperated with the government throughout their investigation and will continue to do so.”

A spokesperson for Waymo said in a statement, “We have always believed competition should be fueled by innovation, and we appreciate the work of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI on this case.”

Since the settlement, Levandowski has reentered the startup world, founding a new company called Pronto.ai. Last December, he revealed that he had designed a camera-based advanced driver assist system (ADAS) called Co-Pilot, which was aimed at the long-haul trucking industry. To help sell his new product, Levandowski took it for a test drive: a 3,000-mile journey from San Francisco to New York without any human intervention.

But in light of these charges, he is out another job. A spokesperson for Pronto.ai confirmed that Levandowski will be replaced by Robbie Miller, chief safety officer and a former Uber manager who famously ripped the ride-hailing company’s lax approach to safety.

“The criminal charges filed against Anthony relate exclusively to Lidar and do not in any way involve Pronto’s ground-breaking technology. Of course, we are fully supportive of Anthony and his family during this period,” the Pronto.ai spokesperson said.

Levandowski also wore another, less obvious hat: church founder. Last year, he filed paperwork to create a religious organization called Way of the Future. According to Backchannel, the purpose is to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”

In a statement, Levandowski’s attorneys, Miles Ehrlich and Ismail Ramsey, deny that their client stole anything and claim he was authorized to download the material from Google while employed by the company:

“For more than a decade, Anthony Levandowski has been an industry-leading innovator in self-driving technologies. He didn’t steal anything, from anyone. This case rehashes claims already discredited in a civil case that settled more than a year and a half ago. The downloads at issue occurred while Anthony was still working at Google—when he and his team were authorized to use the information. None of these supposedly secret files ever went to Uber or to any other company. Over these last couple years, Anthony has continued to lead the development of new and innovative safe-driving technologies to advance this ground-breaking industry. Anthony is innocent, and we look forward to proving it at trial.”

Levandowski is scheduled to be arraigned on the charges on August 27, 2019, at 1:30 p.m. before U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael M. Cousins.

The case is being brought by the Bay Area’s new corporate fraud “strike force,” headed by US Attorney David Anderson. “All of us have the right to change jobs,” Anderson said, “none of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door. Theft is not innovation.”