Levandowski vs. Waymo
An engineer downloaded 14,000 files on his way out of Google's self-driving program, founded a startup, sold it to Uber, and eventually pled guilty to trade-secret theft.
Anthony Levandowski was, by most accounts, one of the most consequential engineers in Google's self-driving program. He had been there since the beginning, in the small team that grew into what eventually spun out as Waymo. In late 2015, in the weeks before his departure, he downloaded roughly fourteen thousand files — design documents, schematics, internal discussions of lidar architecture — onto an external drive.
The startup that lasted a few months
Levandowski left Google, founded a self-driving truck startup called Otto, and within months sold Otto to Uber for approximately 680 million dollars in equity. The acquisition put Levandowski in charge of Uber's self-driving program, which had been struggling to keep pace with Waymo's.
The transition might have ended there if Waymo had not noticed the similarity of a particular lidar component in an Uber design that one of its own suppliers had inadvertently shown a Waymo engineer. Waymo filed suit against Uber in early 2017, alleging trade-secret theft.
Suit, settlement, and a federal indictment
The civil case settled in 2018, with Uber giving Waymo equity worth approximately 245 million dollars and agreeing not to use Waymo intellectual property. The federal criminal case against Levandowski himself, separate from the corporate dispute, ended with a guilty plea on one count of trade-secret theft in 2020 and an eighteen-month prison sentence. He was pardoned by President Trump days before reporting to prison.
What the chronicle remembers
Levandowski vs. Waymo is the case study in insider exfiltration at the intersection of frontier technology and intense competition. It also sharpened the legal and contractual treatment of departures from high-stakes engineering teams; non-compete language, exit interviews, and DLP coverage on personal storage devices all became significantly less optional in the AV industry after 2017.