In a federal court filing in San Francisco, Waymo said Anthony Levandowski, who runs Uber’s autonomous car division,
downloaded 14,000 files from Google a month before leaving to start his own self-driving car company, Otto.
Waymo also said that a number of Google employees, who subsequently left to join
Mr. Levandowski at Google, downloaded additional trade secrets before departing.
SAN FRANCISCO — Waymo, the self-driving car business spun out of Google’s parent company, claimed in a federal lawsuit on Thursday
that Uber was using intellectual property stolen by one of Google’s former project leaders.
In December, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said
that its seven-year-old autonomous vehicle project was spinning off from its research lab X and would operate as a stand-alone company called Waymo.
Mr. Levandowski left Google in early 2016 to found Otto with Lior Ron, who also was experienced in autonomous vehicle research and digital mapping.
In December, Uber ran into opposition to a test of its self-driving Volvo XC-90s in San Francisco, an operation
the California Department of Motor Vehicles said was illegal because Uber did not hold the proper permits.
“Otto and Uber have taken Waymo’s intellectual property so
that they could avoid incurring the risk, time, and expense of independently developing their own technology,” the company said in the filing.
Tesla’s suit, filed against Mr. Anderson and his partner Chris Urmson, a former Google employee, also claims
that Mr. Anderson took proprietary information and tried to cover his tracks by destroying information.
