Alphabet’s Waymo Sues Uber Over Self-Driving Car Secrets
Alphabet’s Waymo Sues Uber Over Self-Driving Car Secrets
Suit accuses former Waymo employees of downloading
information and leaving to join Uber’s Otto
By TIM HIGGINS and
JACK NICAS Updated Feb. 23, 2017 9:11 p.m. ET
Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s heated rivalry with Uber
Technologies Inc. over self-driving cars has spilled into the courthouse, after
the internet giant sued the ride-hailing company for allegedly stealing trade
secrets to jump-start its own autonomous vehicle program.
Anthony Levandowski, a former key manager in the Google
self-driving car project, is accused of secretly downloading 14,000 files in
December 2015 before departing Alphabet last year to create Otto, a
self-driving truck maker acquired last year by Uber.
This information was allegedly used by Uber to develop a
laser sensor for self-driving navigation, according to the lawsuit filed by
Alphabet’s Waymo LLC unit on Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.
“We take the allegations made against Otto and Uber
employees seriously and we will review this matter carefully,” said an Uber
spokeswoman, who declined to make Mr. Levandowski available.
Waymo claims other former employees who are now at Uber
also allegedly downloaded confidential information about the laser sensor
before they left Waymo, including supplier lists and manufacturing details.
“Defendants leveraged stolen information to shortcut the
process and purportedly build a comparable (laser sensor) system in only nine
months,” Waymo’s complaint said.
Waymo said in a blog post Thursday that it spent
thousands of hours and millions of dollars to develop its proprietary
laser-sensor system. “Misappropriating this technology is akin to stealing a
secret recipe from a beverage company,” the company said.
Among the records allegedly taken by Mr. Levandowski,
according to the suit, were the circuit board designs for Waymo’s lidar, or
light detection and ranging system used to guide a vehicle. Waymo said in the
suit that a vendor “inadvertently” copied one of its employees on an email in
December 2016 discussing an Uber project that contained the machine drawing for
Uber’s circuit board that “bore a striking resemblance” to Waymo’s design.
Waymo alleges in the suit that a month before Mr.
Levandowski left the company in January 2016, he “took extraordinary efforts to
raid Waymo’s design server and then conceal his activities.” Mr. Levandowski
allegedly installed special software on his company laptop to access the
specific computer server, and then downloaded 9.7 gigabytes of confidential
data from it, according to the suit.
He then attached an external hard drive to his laptop for
eight hours, before erasing the history of his computer, the suit said. After
that, he used his company laptop for another few minutes, “and then
inexplicably never used it again,” the suit said.
The suit alleges that on Jan. 14, 2016, Mr. Levandowski
met with high-level Uber executives at Uber’s headquarters in San Francisco. A
day later, he allegedly registered the company that would become Otto,
initially calling it 280 Systems, the suit said. Twelve days later, he left
Alphabet, according to the suit.
Uber bought Otto for $680 million in stock in August
2016—shortly after Mr. Levandowski received his final multimillion-dollar compensation
check from Alphabet, the suit said.
The suit is the latest salvo in the
friendship-turned-rivalry between Alphabet and Uber. In 2013, Google’s venture
arm invested $258 million in Uber, and longtime Google executive David Drummond
joined the startup’s board. Google has let users book Uber rides in its Google
Maps app, and Uber has also used Google’s mapping software to underpin its
ride-sharing service.
But as Uber has expanded its size and ambitions over the
past two years, the two companies have increasingly been on a collision course.
Beyond self-driving cars, Uber has begun developing its
own mapping software and started a package- and food-delivery service that
competes with a similar Google offering. Google’s Waze navigation app,
meanwhile, is expanding its own ride-sharing service that lets users carpool
with each other to work.
In August, Mr. Drummond said he left Uber’s board “given
the overlap between the two companies.”
The suit comes at a rough time for Uber, which is reeling
from sexual harassment charges from a former software engineer. The company
this week hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the
claims and promised to make changes to its human resources department to better
handle complaints of sexism and harassment.
Waymo’s lawsuit follows one filed by Tesla Inc. last
month in a California state court against the former director of its Autopilot
program Sterling Anderson and Chris Urmson, the former chief technology officer
of Google’s self-driving project. Tesla has accused the two of improperly
recruiting people away from the auto maker to work at their newly formed
autonomous car startup. The startup has denied wrongdoing.
—Greg Bensinger and Sara Randazzo contributed to this
article.
Write to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com and Jack
Nicas at jack.nicas@wsj.com
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