Ex-Google engineer charged in Uber self-driving theft case

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A former Google engineer was charged today with stealing closely guarded secrets he later sold to Uber as the ride-hailing service scrambled to catch up in the high-stakes race to build robotic vehicles.

The indictment filed by the U.S. Attorney's office in San Jose, is an offshoot of a lawsuit filed in 2017 by Waymo, a self-driving car pioneer spun off from Google. Uber agreed to pay Waymo $245 million to settle the case, but the federal judge overseeing the lawsuit made an unusual recommendation to open a criminal probe .

Uber considered having self-driving technology crucial to survive.

Anthony Levandowski, a pioneer in robotic vehicles, was charged with 33 counts of trade secrets theft. He could be sentenced up to 10 years and fined $250,000 per count, $8.25 million altogether.

Prosecutors say the probe is ongoing, but they wouldn't say whether Uber and former CEO Travis Kalanick are targets. Prosecutors say Google and Uber cooperated in the investigation.

Although the indictment didn't charge Uber, it's a stain for a company that has been trying to recover from a series of scandals since jettisoning Kalanick two years ago. Besides trying to reverse perceptions that it's a technological thief, Uber has been dealing with fallout from its own acknowledgement of rampant sexual harassment, its use of software designed to dupe regulators and a yearlong cover-up of a hacking attack that stole the personal information of 57 million passengers and 600,000 drivers.

The case seems unlikely to endear Uber with investors already skeptical about the company's ability to make money after piling up billions of dollars of losses. The lack of profits is the main reason the company's stock has fallen about 25 percent below the price set during its much-ballyhooed initial public offering of stock in May. Nonetheless, Uber's stock fell less than 1 percent after the announcement.

Levandowski was accused of stealing years of top-secret information from Google, which prosecutors called the crown jewels of the company. That included Google's breakthroughs in lidar, a key piece of technology that enables self-driving cars to detect what's around them.

In a statement, Levandowski's attorneys maintained his innocence.