Waymo says its engineer, Uber had a secret deal
Lawyers for Waymo and Uber traded explosive revelations about clandestine dealings during a packed San Francisco court hearing Wednesday about whether Uber stole key technology from Waymo for its self-driving car project.
Waymo, formerly Google’s self-driving unit, is seeking a preliminary injunction to halt Uber’s work on selfdriving cars, which the ridehailing company sees as key to its future. Waymo alleges that its former star engineer Anthony Levandowski stole a proprietary way to build lidar, which helps autonomous cars see the world around them, and brought that to Uber.
The case pits two of tech’s biggest stars against each other in the race to develop robot cars, a once-sci-fi technology that’s now widely acknowledged to be the near future of the multitrillion-dollar auto industry.
In court, Waymo attorney Charles Verhoeven alleged that Otto, the self-driving truck compa-
ny that Levandowski started last year soon after abruptly quitting Waymo, was nothing more than a shell game to let Uber get its hands on Waymo’s intellectual property.
“Uber and Levandowski created a cover-up scheme for what they were doing,” Verhoeven told U.S. District Judge William Alsup. “They concocted a story for public consumption.”
Uber attorney Arturo Gonzalez defended the San Francisco ride-hailing company. “We are adamant that we did not use any of (Waymo’s) secrets,” he said, characterizing the dispute as something between Waymo and Levandowski. “There’s no evidence Levandowski brought Waymo files to Uber.”
Verhoeven claimed that Levandowski secretly negotiated with Brian McClendon, Uber’s vice president of mapping, in October, while he was still working at Waymo. He presented documents indicating that the two men discussed a longrange laser “that corresponds exactly to a product Waymo had developed.” McClendon, who previously had spent 10 years at Google, left Uber in March.
“While Mr. Levandowski was still working at Waymo, Uber and Mr. Levandowski were planning to have Mr. Levandowski build a custom lidar for Uber based on his experience with Waymo’s efforts,” Verhoeven said.
According to Waymo, in December 2015, Levandowski spent eight hours downloading 14,000 proprietary documents from the Mountain View company, then “tried to cover his tracks by reformatting his laptop and wiping clean what he had done.” Forensics revealed the theft however, the company’s attorneys said.
The following month, Levandowski quit Waymo with no notice.
Verhoeven showed documents indicating that Levandowski was awarded 5 million shares of Uber stock, worth $25 million, in a grant dated Jan. 28, 2016 — months before Uber acquired Otto for $680 million in August.
Uber representatives said out of court that Levandowski wasn’t granted the stock until August. The grant carried an earlier date to give him credit for his time at Otto, which they characterized as a typical arrangement in acquisitions. The vesting is based on meeting technical milestones over time, so Levandowski has no vested Uber shares yet, the company said.
Uber has blocked the release of 3,500 documents related to its acquisition of Otto that Waymo requested as evidence. Verhoeven said Uber decided to cloak those documents, which include all its communications with Levandowski, two months after he quit Google, long before Uber acquired his company. An Uber email said the documents were being shielded in anticipation of litigation, Verhoeven said, providing “circumstantial evidence of bad intent.”
Those documents are key, Waymo said — and Alsup agreed.
“To me, that’s a treasure trove that would say what really happened in this case,” he said.
Levandowski has asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination throughout the case, and extended that to his personal laptop.
Alsup said that Levandowski appears to be culpable. “You have solid proof he did all that downloading under suspicious circumstances, and Uber has not denied it,” he said. (In fact, an Uber attorney later replied to a direct question about whether it disputed the downloading had occurred by saying: “We don’t have any basis for disputing that.”)
Later, Alsup speculated that Levandowski could have simply taken his personal laptop to work at Uber and consulted it to use Waymo’s trade secrets without telling Uber. Waymo has not shown strong evidence to prove that Uber knew about the trade secrets, Alsup said.
“What if it turns out Uber is totally innocent, and the worst thing they did is pay a lot of money to hire away a brilliant guy from a competitor without realizing he was downloading all this information?” he said. That would turn the case into an arbitration claim against Levandowski, he said. (Google and Waymo, like most companies, mandate arbitration for employee disputes in hiring contracts.)
Much of Waymo’s arguments hinged on the “adverse inference” to be drawn from Levandowski asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.
Absent Levandowski’s testimony and Uber’s 3,500 withheld documents, Verhoeven said, Uber might “get away with it” — meaning stealing Waymo’s technology.
Gonzalez, the Uber attorney, noted that the company voluntarily had Levandowski step down from working on lidar development and would consent to a preliminary injunction on that, telling him, “No more lidar for you until this trial is done.”
Levandowski may be refusing to testify, but everyone else at Uber wants to tell their side of the story, Gonzalez said, dangling the prospect of company CEO Travis Kalanick submitting to a deposition.
“No one is hiding at Uber,” he said.
In a moment of courtroom theatrics, Gonzalez and his associates trotted out a bulky hardware device called Spider, a form of lidar under development at Uber, and took pains to paint it as a piece of garbage — “undesirable for use in Uber vehicles” — making the point that it couldn’t possibly have been copied from Waymo.
Alsup’s ruling on the preliminary injunction is expected in a few days. The case will go to trial in October.
Los Angeles employment lawyer Dan Handman, who followed the hearing but was not involved in the case, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Alsup issues a temporary injunction barring Levandowski from further work with Uber.
“Similarly, it is entirely reasonable to think that Uber will be ordered to turn over the so-called ‘treasure trove’ of disputed documents or face a major adverse inference at trial,” he said in an email. “What remains unlikely, however, is Alsup granting a broad injunction keeping Uber out of the autonomous vehicle business.”