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