A former Google engineer was hit with criminal charges on Tuesday alleging he stole trade secrets from the technology giant’s self-driving car project before he went to work at Uber.
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If convicted on the charges, Anthony Levandowski faces up to 10 years in prison and a penalty of $2,50,000 per violation, according to federal prosecutors who announced the criminal indictment.
“All of us have the right to change jobs, none of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door,” U.S. Attorney David Anderson said in a release announcing 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets. “Theft is not innovation.”
Mr. Levandowski, 39, was a founding member of the group that worked on Waymo, a Google self-driving car project that is now a unit at parent company Alphabet.
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Mr. Levandowski worked on the project from 2009 and was leader of the light-detecting and ranging (LiDAR) team when he resigned from Google without notice in January of 2016, according to the indictment.
The former star engineer left Google for his own start-up called Otto, which was later acquired by Uber.
The theft allegations came out in a civil case in which Waymo accused Uber of stealing trade secrets. That case ended with a settlement between the two firms last year.
Documents state that Mr. Levandowski downloaded thousands of files before leaving Google including “critical engineering information” about the hardware and instructions for calibrating and tuning Google’s custom LiDAR.