Google startup company Weymo and car service company Uber are gearing up for a massive court battle, and it all has to do with self driving cars. I'm Jonathan Strickland, and this is tech stuff. Daily lawsuits focusing on intellectual property are fairly common in the text sphere. For example, Apple and Samsung have waged global war against one another in various courtrooms with claims and counterclaims of IP theft.
But there's a face off that has been garnering more attention in the technosphere over the course of it pits Weymo against Uber. Weymo is a spinoff company from Google. It got its start as Google's self driving research and development team. Today it's one of several companies under the umbrella of Google's parent company, Alphabet. Uber is the car service company that has been fighting pr battles on multiple
fronts over the last couple of years. Company executives have faced tough questions about sexual harassment, background checks on Uber drivers, the number of hours drivers work during a week, and more. But this particular battle focuses on valuable information and technology
for self driving cars. Much of the case depends upon the actions of Anthony Lewandowski He's an engineer who used to work for Google's self driving car team before he left the company to found his own startup called Auto O t t O. The startups goal was to create self driving trucks, something many experts believe is an inevitability
that will disrupt the shipping industry. Lewandowski's history with autonomous vehicles dates back to two thousand four, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency a k A DARPA held the Grand Challenge. This was a race that picked teams against each other to build autonomous vehicles capable of racing against the clock in a desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Lewandowski's team designed a self driving motorcycle. It didn't win,
but it did turn a lot of heads. He went on to work with Sebastian Thrunn, who led us Stanford University team to a victory in the second DARPA Grand Challenge. Thrond's team, including Lewandowski, were brought on to Google after the company acquired a tool the team had built that served as one of the pillars for Google's street View project.
When Google began to explore the possibilities of autonomous vehicles, Lewandowski was an instrumental part of the team, but he became restless and started to look at creating a new startup company in the self driving vehicle space in two thousand fifteen. That was also the year Google valuated the self driving car project at four point five billion dollars, which meant Lewandowski earned a fifty million dollar bonus. Lewandowski left Google and launched Auto in May. Later, Google executives
began to investigate Lewandowski's departure. At least one executive previously suggested to human resources that Lewandowski be terminated from his position, citing some suspect behavior. Google claims the investigation discovered that Lewandowski had downloaded some fourteen thousand confidential files to a personal computer before leaving Google. These files represented an enormous amount of research and tech in the autonomous vehicle field,
including a great deal about lidar. That's a laser based sensing and guidance system that Google self driving vehicles rely upon for navigation and environment detection. But where does Uber come in. Lewandowski apparently did some consulting work with Uber in sixteen, and the company eventually hired him and acquired his company Otto for a reported six hundred eighty million dollars,
though Uber disputes this amount. Google's self driving car division at this point, known as Weymo, began to investigate the possibility that Lewandowski and Uber came to this agreement largely because of the proprietary information Lewandowski was privy to. Uber denies these allegations. Lewandowski has executed his Fifth Amendment rights,
protecting him again self incrimination, and won't speak to authorities. Recently, a former Uber employee named Richard Jacobs stirred the pot when the U. S. Attorney's Office took a piece of evidence from an employment dispute between Jacobs and Uber and submitted it to the Weymo versus Uber case. That evidence was a thirty seven page letter written by Jacobs's lawyer,
and it had some pretty damning evidence in it. In that letter, there are claims that Uber had dedicated teams and resources specifically to gaining access to trade secrets from competitors, trade secrets like the ones included in those fourteen thousand files Lewandowski saved to his personal machine. Uber disputes the claims in the letter, but the company also paid a settlement to Jacobs to the tune of four point five million dollars, with another three million dollars going to Jacobs's lawyer.
Paying seven point five million dollars to settle a dispute makes it sound like there may have been something to worry about in those allegations. Nothing yet has been proven in court. However, the story is even more complicated than what I've laid out, and there are other interesting tangential elements.
For example, Lewandowski recently founded a nonprofit organization called Way of the Future, a religious organization with the goal to quote develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence, and through understanding and worship of the Godhead, contribute to the betterment of society end quote. Something tells me I should probably dedicate an entire episode to just
that little nugget of news. To learn more about some of the craziest legal battles in tech, as well as how this technology actually works. Subscribe to the Tech Stuff podcast, we published twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays, and we take a closer look at all this chaos in an effort to make some sense out of it I'll see you again soon.