The FBI charged a former Google executive and one of the leading engineers in the self-driving car industry Tuesday with stealing trade secrets when he left the company to join Uber.
Anthony Levandowski was charged with 33 counts of trying to steal proprietary information from Google.
Levandowski first joined Google in 2007. By 2015, he was a high-ranking executive working on self-driving cars for the company.
According to US attorney David L. Anderson, an indictment alleges that beginning in September 2015, Levandowski began moving company files from his work computer to his personal computer.
In January 2016, Levandowski announced he was leaving Google to start his own self-driving cat company, Otto. That company was later acquired by Uber.
In 2018, Levandowski settled a lawsuit with Waymo, Google's self-driving car division, that alleged he stole trade secrets from the company before he left.
More on this as it develops.
