Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski charged with stealing driverless car trade secrets

Levandowski is accused of downloading nearly 14,000 files from Waymo servers before quitting the company for a rival in 2016

Anthony Levandowski, a former engineer at Google and Uber, has been charged by federal prosecutors with 33 counts of trade secret theft from Google-owned Waymo.

According to the criminal complaint filed by the US Department of Justice, Levandowski downloaded nearly 14,000 files from Waymo servers to his laptop in the months leading up to his departure from the company in 2016.

If found guilty, Levandowski could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison, and face a fine of up to $250,000 - for each count.

According to Reuters, lawyers for Levandowski argued in court that their client was innocent and didn't steal any trade secrets from Waymo.

Anthony Levandowski, the pioneering self-driving engineer, was once a star engineer at Google and Uber.

After joining Google in 2007, he worked on the Street View project before he was shifted to the self-driving car project team. This was ultimately spun-out into a separate company, called Waymo.

Levandowski left Google in January 2016 to create his own self-driving startup, Otto, which was acquired by Uber in August 2016 for a reported $680 million.

In 2017, Google's parent company Alphabet brought a civil lawsuit against Uber, accusing the taxi-hailing app firm of stealing intellectual property belonging to Waymo. Alphabet alleged that the boss of Otto had downloaded 9.7 gigabytes of intellectual property from Waymo servers before leaving the company.

Alphabet also claimed that the files downloaded by Levandowski included details about the PCBs used in custom Lidar as well as other sensitive hardware information about self-driving car technology.

In May 2017, Uber fired Anthony Levandowski from his job.

In the court, Uber executives were accused of concealing evidence that they knew of Waymo intellectual property theft.

The civil suit between Uber and Alphabet was finally settled with Uber agreeing to pay about $245 million to Waymo. The federal judge overseeing the civil case also recommended federal prosecutors to start a criminal investigation in the case.

On Tuesday, Levandowski was arraigned in a San Jose, California court. His lawyers argued that the downloading of the files, which Levandowski is accused of, occurred when he was authorised to use the information.

The lawyers also claimed that none of the files were shared by Levandowski with Uber or any other firm.

Levandowski was released by the court on a $2 million bond.