Tesla is said to have sued one of its former employees for stealing company information and breaching the contract, CNBC reports.
According to a trial filed on Friday Tesla claims that software engineer Alex Khatilov quietly siphoned code and software files from Tesla’s internal Warp Drive system while working for the company qduality Ainsurance team. The complaint says he started working for the company in December and in a few days began sending “thousands of highly confidential software files” to his personal Dropbox account.
Tesla Warp Drive software is a back-end system developed in-house to automate many of its business processes related to the production and sale of cars. The company claims that the stolen material could reveal to potential competitors “what systems Tesla believes are important and valuable to automate and how to automate them – providing a roadmap to copy Tesla’s innovation,” according to the lawsuit. The code in question took about 200 years of man-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 elaborated in another New York Post interview that everything was a misunderstanding.
Khatilov said he was trained to download the files to his computer because he would work with them as part of his job on Tesla’s quality assurance team, which involved helping automate tasks related to the company’s environmental, health and safety systems. When he tried to back up a folder that contained internal documents, he inadvertently moved it to Dropbox.
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“I didn’t know there were 26,000 files there,” he told reporters. He didn’t even know that Tesla had filed a lawsuit against him until the Post reached him.
Honestly, it’s not hard to believe. Tesla strictly protects its proprietary data and has a history of sharing processes whenever it receives the slightest scent that its secret sauce may be in danger. Tesla has accused another former employee, Guangzhi Cao, stealing the source code related to its autopilot system in 2018 and that the process is still resolved in court. Tesla also sued the self-driving startup Zoox in 2019 and the electric car manufacturer Rivian in 2020, after the alleged separation of trade secrets. In April last year, Zoox settled with Tesla for an undisclosed amount and acknowledged that “some of its new Tesla employees” had internal Tesla documents.