Tesla is reportedly taking one of its former employees to court for allegedly stealing company information and breaching the contract, CNBC reports.
According to one plet presented on Friday, Tesla claims software engineer Alex Khatilov silently siphoned code and software files from Tesla’s internal Warp Drive system while working at the company qquality asecurity equipment. The complaint says he began working for the company in December and within days began sending “thousands of highly confidential software files” to his personal Dropbox account.
Tesla’s 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 the stolen material could reveal to competitors “what systems Tesla believes are important and valuable to automate and how to automate them, providing a roadmap for copying Tesla’s innovation,” according to the lawsuit. The code in question took “200 years-man-work” to develop, according to Tesla.
When Tesla investigators clashed on Jan. 6, Khatilov claimed he simply “forgot” that he had transferred the files to his personal Dropbox. He delved into one New York Post interview that it was all a misunderstanding.
Khatilov said he was instructed to download the files to his computer because he would work with them as part of his work with Tesla’s quality control team, which involved helping automate tasks related to security systems, the environment. environment and health of the company. When I tried to back up a folder that contained the internal documents cache, I inadvertently moved it to Dropbox.
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“I didn’t know there were 26,000 files,” he told the dam. He didn’t even know that Tesla had filed a lawsuit against him until the Post contacted him.
Honestly, this is not hard to believe. Tesla is a fierce protection of its proprietary data and has a background in filing lawsuits as long as it has the slightest taste that its secret sauce may be at risk. Tesla charged another former employee, Guangzhi Cao, of stealing source code related to its autopilot system in 2018, and that the lawsuit is still being settled in court. Tesla also sued the stand-alone start-up Zoox in 2019 and the electric car manufacturer Rivian in 2020 to supposedly come out with trade secrets. Last April, Zoox agreed with Tesla to obtain an undisclosed sum and admitted that “some of its new Tesla contracts” had internal Tesla documents.