Anthony Levandowski

Prior to filing its lawsuit against Uber in 2017, Google had separately taken Levandowski to private arbitration over a contract dispute. On March 4, 2020, Levandowski filed for bankruptcy protection after the court confirmed an arbitration panel’s ruling that Levandowski and his colleague Lior Ron had breached their employment contracts with Google by poaching employees for their startup. The panel found that Levandowski owed Google $179 million—$120 million accounted for salary he received while at the company, and the remainder for interest and legal fees accrued.

On March 30, 2020, Levandowski filed a motion with a California bankruptcy judge to force Uber to honor its contractual obligation to indemnify Levandowski. At issue is the validity of the indemnification agreement that Uber, Levandowski, and Ron entered into. According to a document filed with the court, “The indemnification agreement was structured to ensure that Mr. Levandowski would not be left unprotected against Google, which had inexhaustible resources to attack Mr. Levandowski.” Uber initially honored the agreement and covered both Levandowski and Ron’s legal costs. However, in April 2018, days before the final arbitration hearing that resulted in Levandowski owing Google $179 million, Uber informed him it would be seeking reimbursement for his defense costs, arguing he had breached their agreement by refusing to testify.

On March 19, 2020 Levandowski pleaded guilty to one of the thirty-three charges originally brought against him by the Department of Justice. Levandowski’s plea to the 33rd count was for downloading an internal project tracking document called, “Chauffer TL Weekly – Q4 2015.” Originally charged with stealing documents containing trade secrets, technical specifications, and Lidar design, “Chauffer Weekly”  was a single spreadsheet consisting of team goals, project metrics, and weekly status updates accessible by Levandowski’s team on an unsecured Google Drive. Levandowski admitted to accessing the document about one month after leaving Google in February 2016. “Mr. Levandowski accepts responsibility and is looking forward to resolving this matter,” his attorney, Miles Ehrlich, said in a statement. Judge William Alsup, will decide Levandowski’s final sentence.

On August 27, 2019 Levandowski was indicted on 33 federal charges of alleged theft of self-driving car trade secrets. On March 19th, 2020 Levandowski announced a plea deal with federal prosecutors where he agreed to plead guilty to one of 33 charges, admitting in court documents, "I downloaded this file with the intent to use it for the benefit of someone other than Google."

On August 27th, 2019, Levandowski was charged by the Department of Justice for the alleged theft of trade secrets from Google's self-driving unit Waymo. The charges alleged Levandowski downloaded thousands of files from Waymo's predecessor, Project Chauffeur, in the months before he left Google. The files allegedly included “critical engineering information about the hardware used on Project Chauffeur self-driving vehicles,” and that Levandowski transferred files onto his personal laptop before leaving the company. Following the indictment, Pronto, a new self-driving trucking company that Levandowski co-founded, announced their Chief Safety Officer, Robbie Miller, would take over as CEO.

In 2018, Levandowski launched Pronto AI to produce a camera-based, self-driving highway-only retrofit system for semi-trucks. As proof of concept, Levandowski claimed to have taken a modified self-driving Prius 3,100 miles across the United States.

Levandowski worked on Google's self-driving car until January 2016, when he left to found Otto, a company that makes self-driving kits to retrofit big rig trucks, because he "was eager to commercialize a self-driving vehicle as quickly as possible". Otto was acquired by Uber in late July 2016, at which point Levandowski assumed leadership of Uber's driverless car operation. On May 15, 2017, United States District Judge banned Levandowski from further work on Otto's Lidar technology on the basis of having breached the confidentiality of former employer Waymo. On May 30, 2017, Uber fired Levandowski for failing to cooperate with investigators.

According to a February 2017 civil lawsuit filed by Waymo officially known as Waymo v. Uber (Levandowski was not a defendant in the case),Levandowski allegedly "downloaded 9.7 GB of Waymo’s confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation" before resigning to found Otto. Google co-founder Larry Page was reluctant to file the suit, but was pushed over the edge when one of Waymo's suppliers inadvertently copied a Waymo engineer on an email of a schematic of Uber's lidar design. Uber's design appeared to be almost identical to that of Waymo. The civil suit between Uber and Waymo was settled in February 2018 with Uber agreeing to pay Waymo 0.34% of its equity, valued at approximately $245 million, and not to use the unit's technology.

In March 2017, United States District Judge William Haskell Alsup referred the civil case to federal prosecutors, citing the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 after Levandowski exercised his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. In May 2017, Judge Alsup ordered Levandowski to refrain from working on Lidar at Uber and required Uber to disclose its discussions on the technology. Levandowski was later fired by Uber for failing to cooperate in an internal investigation.

In 2007 Levandowski joined Google to work on Google Street View with Sebastian Thrun, whom he had met at the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. While still working at Google he founded 510 Systems, a mobile mapping start-up that experimented with lidar technology. In 2008 he founded Anthony's Robots to build the Pribot, "a self-driving Toyota Prius with one of the first spinning Lidar laser ranging units, and the first ever to drive on public roads."

In 1998, Levandowski entered the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. As a freshman, he launched an intranet service from his basement. In 2004 he and fellow UC Berkeley engineers built an autonomous motorcycle, nicknamed Ghostrider, for the DARPA Grand Challenge. The Ghostrider motorcycle competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and 2005 and was the only autonomous two-wheeled vehicle in the competition. The motorcycle now resides in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Anthony Levandowski (born March 15, 1980) is a French-American self-driving car engineer known for his work in the advancement of self-driving technology. In 2016 he co-founded Ottomotto, LLC an autonomous trucking company, with Lior Ron, Claire Delaunay and Don Burnette which later sold to Uber Technologies, Inc. Prior to founding Otto, he helped build the Google self-driving car program, working as a co-founder and technical lead on the project known as Waymo from 2009 until his departure in 2016. In 2018 he co-founded Pronto trucking company. Pronto was the first company to complete a cross-country drive in an autonomous vehicle in October 2018. Despite this, at the 2019 AV Summit hosted by The Information, Levandowski remarked that a fundamental breakthrough in AI is needed to move autonomous vehicle technology forward.