Travis Kalanick’s “brother from another mother,” Anthony Levandowski, has officially stepped down from leading Uber’s self-driving car division. Levandowski is a key player in a lawsuit filed by his former employer, Google, that claims he stole tech that Uber is incorporating into its cars. This isn’t a minor legal proceeding.
Attorneys for Uber worked Thursday morning to convince a federal judge that a case brought by rival Waymo over the alleged theft of trade secrets from the company should be dealt with in arbitration and not in a public trial, the latest twist in the high-stakes legal battle over the future of autonomous cars. Uber argued inside a federal courtroom in San Francisco today that Waymo’s claims relate to Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski, who it says committed the theft while still a Google employee (Google parent Alphabet Inc. owns Waymo), making the issue a violation of his contract and therefore a matter to be resolved through private arbitration. Waymo, created last year to commercialize Google’s robotic car software and hardware, insisted that’s not the basis of its suit. …
Accused of stealing a key sensor for self-driving cars from rival Waymo, Uber argued Friday that it started developing its own lidar months before hiring one of Waymo’s former top engineers. Waymo sued Uber in February, saying that the engineer — Anthony Levandowski — had taken Waymo’s proprietary design for lidar, a laser version of radar that autonomous vehicles use to scan their surroundings. In a long-awaited court filing Friday, Uber said …
Uber’s very bad February just got worse. Google’s (er, Alphabet’s) self-driving car company, Waymo, filed a lawsuit against Uber on Thursday, claiming Uber stole its design for a laser-scanning detection system from Waymo. The heart of the claim focuses on Otto, a self-driving trucking company founded by former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski and acquired by Uber for $680 million in August …