Uber fires engineer in trade-secrets dispute

SAN FRANCISCO — Uber has fired Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of its legal fight over driverless cars.

Levandowski, the 37-yearold former chief of Uber’s self-driving vehicle program, was notified Friday, according to a termination letter obtained by The Washington

Post. The company said he was let go after not complying with a judge’s request that he turn over thousands of documents that he is accused of stealing from Google’s parent company, where he had worked as a senior engineer.

The New York Times was the first to report the news.

Uber also said he had broken the terms of his employment with the company. Under those terms, Levandowski promised that he wasn’t sharing any trade secrets or proprietary information from his previous employer.

The firing is the latest twist in a case that has pitted two Silicon Valley giants against each other. Levandowski was a senior engineer in Google’s self-driving car program, now known as Waymo. The Google program began work on self-driving cars in 2009.

Levandowski is accused of downloading 14,000 documents from his Google computers onto a hard drive and then uploading them to his personal computer. He has not turned over any documents to the court, citing his Fifth Amendment right to protect himself from selfincrimination.