Ex-Google and Uber engineer charged with theft

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has filed criminal charges against a former senior engineer at Google's owner Alphabet alleging he stole car technology secrets.

Anthony Levandowski was charged with 33 counts of trade theft involving Alphabet's self-driving car technology.

He had left Alphabet's Waymo unit in 2016 and eventually ran Uber's self-driving car project, only to be fired.

The 39-year-old, who now runs his own firm, denies the charges.

"Not a single one of these supposedly secret files ever went to Uber or to any other company or person," said Miles Ehrlich, a lawyer for Mr Levandowski.

Waymo and Uber were involved in a protracted lawsuit, which the taxi company eventually settled in 2018. Mr Levandowski was not party to that case, and did not publicly comment on the allegations.

The claim is that before leaving Waymo, Mr Levandowski downloaded thousands of files in 2015 related to Alphabet's self-driving car technology, including details related to Lidar, a crucial sensor technology for self-driving cars.

"All of us have the right to change jobs, none of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door," Californian federal prosecutor David Anderson said. "Theft is not innovation."