Former Google self-driving car engineer charged with theft of trade secrets

Federal prosecutors charged Anthony Levandowski, the pioneering self-driving car engineer, with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google on Tuesday. The criminal indictment is the latest twist in a years-long dispute over intellectual property between Google, where Levandowski worked on autonomous vehicles for nearly a decade, and Uber, which purchased a self-driving startup from Levandowski for a reported $680m in August 2016. According to the criminal complaint, Levandowski downloaded approximately 14,000 files from Google and transferred them to his personal laptop in the months preceding his departure from Google – after he had begun discussions with executives at Uber. The files included "critical engineering information" about hardware for self-driving cars and "schematics for the printed circuit boards used in various custom Lidar products". Uber and Google's self-driving car spinoff, Waymo, reached a settlement in a civil lawsuit over the dispute in February 2018, four days into the trial.