Levandowski agrees plea deal over Google self-driving car secrets theft
Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Uber’s self-driving unit, has agreed to plead guilty to stealing trade secrets from his former employer Google before joining Uber and kickstarting the ride-sharing company’s self-driving car development.
According to a statement from the US Department of Justice, Levandowski submitted documents on Thursday, March 19, requesting that the court accept his plea of guilty to theft of trade secrets charges.
The documents include a request to William Alsup, US District Judge, to accept a proposed plea agreement and a request to schedule a date for a sentencing hearing.
Should the court accept his plea, Levandowski will face a maximum sentence of ten years in prison (though media reports are citing an expected sentence of around 30 months), and a fine of $250,000, added the statement.
Levandowski’s agreement appears to be the last move of a legal battle that’s been raging since August 2019, when a California grand jury indicted him. In early March 2020, Levandowski was ordered to pay Google $179 million, after being accused of stealing trade when he left Google’s self-driving subsidiary Waymo in 2016.
Google alleged that Levandowski downloaded confidential engineering, manufacturing, and business documents from Google servers before resigning without notice in 2016.
At the time, David Anderson, US attorney for the US District Court for the Northern District of California, said that while “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”.
At the time of his resignation in January 2016, Levandowski headed Google’s Light Detecting and Ranging ( LiDAR) engineering department. LiDAR is an essential technology in the development of self-driving vehicles.
According to the 2019 indictment, Levandowski downloaded 14,000 files from a secure Google server. The files contained “critical engineering information” about the hardware used in the development of Google’s self-driving vehicles, prosecutors said.
Following his resignation, Levandowski founded his own self-driving vehicle start-up, Ottomotto, which was later bought out by Uber for a reported $680 million.
According to several media reports which appeared at the start of March, Levandowski has now filed for bankruptcy protection.
Both Uber and Google have been contacted for comment.
Did you enjoy reading this story? Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories sent like this straight to your inbox.
Today's top stories:
UPC analysis: is a UK 'litigation hub' on the horizon?
