Tesla is reportedly taking one of its former employees to court for allegedly stealing company information and breaching a contract, CNBC reported.
According to a lawsuit submitted Friday, Tesla claims software engineer Alex Khatilov quietly released software code and files from Tesla’s internal Warp Drive system while working on the company. quality ainsurance team. According to the complaint, he started working for the company in December and within a few days started sending ‘thousands of highly confidential software files’ to his personal Dropbox account.
Tesla’s Warp Drive software is a back-end system developed internally to automate many of its automotive manufacturing and sales processes. The company claims that the stolen material could potentially reveal to competitors “what systems Tesla considers important and valuable to automate and how to automate it – a roadmap to copy Tesla’s innovation”, according to the lawsuit. The code in question took an estimated ‘200 man-years of work ‘to develop, Tesla claims.
When confronted by Tesla investigators on January 6, Khatilov claimed that he simply ‘forgot’ that he had transferred the files to his personal Dropbox. He further expanded in a New York Post maintenance that the whole matter was a misunderstanding.
Khatilov said he was instructed to download the files to his computer because he would work with them as part of his job at Tesla’s QA team, which involved automating tasks related to the environment’s environmental, health and safety systems. When he tried to make a backup copy of a folder with the cache of internal documents, he accidentally moved it to his Dropbox.
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“I did not know there were 26,000 files,” he said. He did not even know that Tesla had filed a lawsuit against him until the Post reached him.
It’s honestly not hard to believe. Tesla is very protective of its own data and has a history of issuing lawsuits when it least feels like its secret sauce could be in jeopardy. Tesla accuses another former employee, Guangzhi Cao, of stealing source code related to the Autopilot system in 2018, and that lawsuit is still being settled in court. Tesla also started the self-driving Zoo in 2019 and the electric car manufacturer Rivian in 2020 over allegedly engaged in trade secrets. Last April, Zoox agreed with Tesla for an undisclosed amount, conceding that “some of its new Tesla rental personnel” were in possession of internal Tesla documents.