Ex-Google engineer Levandowski jailed for trade secrets theft
Disgraced former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski will spend 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets before joining Uber and kickstarting the ride-sharing company’s self-driving car development.
Judge William Alsup imposed the sentence yesterday, August 4, at the US District Court for the Northern District of California after Levandowski pleaded to stealing trade secrets when he left Google’s self-driving subsidiary Waymo in 2016.
According to Reuters, the judge claimed that the conspiracy was the “biggest trade-secret crime” he had ever seen and that a sentence short of imprisonment would have given “a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets”.
On March 19, Levandowski submitted documents to the US Department of Justice, requesting that the court accept his plea of guilty to theft of trade secrets charges, after which he was ordered to pay Google $179 million.
Levandowski downloaded 14,000 files containing confidential engineering, manufacturing, and business documents from Google servers before resigning without notice in 2016. According to prosecutors, the files contained “critical engineering information” about the hardware used in the development of Google’s self-driving vehicles.
Before resigning in 2016, Levandowski headed Google’s Light Detecting and Ranging ( LiDAR) engineering department. LiDAR is an essential technology in the development of self-driving vehicles. Levandowski then founded his own self-driving vehicle start-up, Ottomotto, which was later bought out by Uber for a reported $680 million.
Levandowski has now filed for bankruptcy protection. Both Uber and Google have been contacted for comment.
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