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

Photo by Angelo Merendino / AFP / Getty Images

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…

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