Tesla Autopilot Lawsuit: Elon Musk Company Sues Former Employee For Allegedly Stealing Secrets

Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors Inc. sued Thursday a former employee who was in charge of its Autopilot program, accusing him of stealing confidential company information and also of attempting to poach fellow Tesla employees for his new business venture.

According to the complaint filed by Tesla in a San Jose, California, court, Sterling Anderson (former director of Tesla’s Autopilot program) attempted to recruit at least a dozen Tesla employees (of which only two left eventually) and also took a “hundreds of gigabytes” of confidential and proprietary information related to the development of the semiautonomous Autopilot system which were used to benefit Aurora Innovation LLC, a company Anderson allegedly founded while still employed by Tesla.

The lawsuit also says Anderson was assisted in his recruitment efforts by Chris Urmson, the former head of Google’s self-driving car project (now called Waymo). Anderson's employment was terminated Jan. 4, according to court documents.

“Tesla cannot sit idly by when an employee like Anderson abuses his position of trust and orchestrates a scheme to deliberately and repeatedly violate his non-solicit agreement, hide evidence, and take the company’s confidential and proprietary information for use in a competing venture,” Tesla said in the lawsuit, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Tesla is seeking a court order restricting Anderson, Urmson and Aurora Innovation from using any of Tesla’s proprietary information relating to autonomous driving and also restrict them from employing the services of Tesla employees for a year.

Responding to the lawsuit, Aurora Innovation hit back at Tesla in a statement released Thursday: “Tesla’s meritless lawsuit reveals both a startling paranoia and an unhealthy fear of competition… This abuse of the legal system is a malicious attempt to stifle a competitor and destroy personal reputations. Aurora looks forward to disproving these false allegations in court and to building a successful self-driving business,” according to Bloomberg.