Engineer From Marin To Plead Guilty To Stealing Trade Secret

MARIN COUNTY, CA — Former Uber engineer Anthony Levandowski plans to plead guilty in
federal court in San Francisco to one count of stealing a trade secret related to self-driving cars from Google Inc., according to documents filed in the court on Thursday.

Levandowski, 40, a Marin County resident, was a lead engineer in Google's self-driving car program for seven years until he resigned in January 2016. He joined Uber seven months later to work on its rival driverless car program.

Levandowski won't enter the guilty plea before U.S. District Judge William Alsup until the date he is sentenced, which has not yet been set. The procedure of combining a plea hearing and a sentencing hearing, instead of having two separate court sessions, was announced by the U.S. District Court Monday in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic.

Levandowski faces a possible sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. He will also pay Google Inc. and a related company, Waymo, $756,500 for their costs in aiding federal prosecutors in the criminal investigation.

The count to which Levandowski will plead guilty is one of 33 counts of trade secret thefts that a grand jury charged him with in an indictment in August. That count alleges he stole a trade secret by downloading a weekly report on the Google project to his personal laptop on Jan. 11, 2016. Levandowski abruptly resigned from Google 16 days later.

Levandowski says in the planned agreement that he intended to use the stolen document "to benefit myself and Uber."

While not pleading guilty to any other charges, Levandowski admits in the planned agreement that he also downloaded 14,000 files from a password-protected Google server in December 2015, and downloaded about 20 files from a Google Drive repository between October 2015 and January 2016.

Defense attorney Miles Ehrlich stated, "Mr. Levandowski accepts responsibility and is looking forward to resolving this matter. Mr. Levandowski is a young man with enormous talents and much to contribute to the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles and we hope that this plea will allow him to move on with his life and focus his energies where they matter most."

The driverless car technology bounces laser beams off surrounding objects to create a three-dimensional picture of the car's environment.

Google spun off its self-driving car program in December 2016 as a separate company, Waymo, which is now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company.

In 2018, a civil lawsuit in which Waymo accused Uber of stealing trade secrets went to trial before a jury in Alsup's court, but was settled midway through the trial with Uber's agreement to pay Waymo about $245 million in stock. Levandowski was not a defendant in that case, although the
lawsuit alleged that Uber gained trade secrets through him.

Levandowski was fired by Uber in May 2017, after he refused to cooperate with the company's internal investigation following the filing of Waymo's lawsuit in February of that year.

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--Bay City News