Anthony Levandowski is an ex-Google and Uber engineer. However, he is currently under fire for serious allegations. The engineer was reportedly responsible for the multimillion-dollar lawsuit between Waymo and Uber. He now faces legal charges, including 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets.

Back in 2018, Waymo, the self-driving division of Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against Levandowski. They alleged that the engineer stole 14,000 documents from Google. These documents, they claim, contain information about the company’s self-driving cars. He then proceeded to download the info on to his personal computer.

Levandowski left Google not long after this issue came to light. He then went on to start his own self-driving truck start-up company called Otto. Uber acquired the company shortly after it was created for about $700 million (₦253.4 billion). Waymo had accused Uber of allegedly stealing its files and masquerading the process as an acquisition.

The accused

The files allegedly stolen by Levandowski had drawings and schematics used in Google’s self-driving cars. He was also accused of modifying the company’s self-driving software so that the cars can drive on forbidden routes. The engineer is likely to face as much as 10 years in prison. He may also have to pay some fines and restitution for each count charged.

During the multimillion-dollar trial between Waymo and Uber, Levandowski refused to give a statement. Consequently, Uber laid him off in 2017 just before they settled the lawsuit in early 2018. Although, Uber denied receiving stolen schematics from the engineer.

However, Levandowski has moved on since all these incidences. He went on to start a company called Pronto.ai. The company designed a camera-based advanced driver assist system (ADAS) called Co-Pilot. In the light of the recent revelations, the company has revealed that they will replace Levandowski with Robbie Miller as CEO.