Tesla Sues Former Director of Autopilot for IP-Theft and Poaching of Employees

The American electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla filed a lawsuit today with the Superior Court of California in Santa Clara citing theft of intellectual property and the illegal poaching of Autopilot-engineers against its former director of the Autopilot program Sterling Anderson.

The court documents claim that Anderson downloaded hundreds of Gigabytes of proprietary data from Tesla, as well as that he actively helped his Aurora-co-founder Chris Urmson to poach Autopilot-engineers. Chris Urmson was the former head of Google’s self-driving car program.

Tesla asks for damages and punitive damages. The following video shows Anderson at a talk in May 2016.

Aurora rejected the claims as having no merit and stated that Tesla is abusing the justice system to shut out competitors.

Chris Urmson left Google after more than six years to pursue his own startup Aurora. This startup also works on autonomous systems. Here is Chris Urmson at the SXSW in May 2016 in Austin.

Here is the link to the full court documents.