Tesla is suing a recently hired software engineer who, according to the company, stole critical automated software from its ERP WARP Drive system.
Tesla WARP Drive
While most automakers use corporate software commonly known to third parties, such as SAP, Tesla decided to create its own from scratch.
Jay Vijayan, Tesla’s longtime chief information officer, who left quietly in January 2016, is responsible for leading the development of the system, which Tesla calls “Warp”.
Vijayan discussed what led them to develop their “Warp” system internally during an interview with CIO Insight in 2014:
Elon’s vision is to build a vertically integrated organization, where the flow of information occurs seamlessly between departments and where we have a closed feedback loop for our customers. In doing so, we can provide the best possible product, service and overall experience to our customers as quickly as possible, while we operate efficiently as a company to bring this vision to life, we had to have operations software simple, central business that could connect all departments and allow information to flow seamlessly between departments. Again, we have not found a software program on the market that meets this need.
Elon Musk has since pressured his companies to develop even more new corporate engineering systems to be used in his various companies.
For example, we previously reported on Tesla and SpaceX sharing some custom software platforms designed for materials research.
WARP encompasses many important back-end software that automates many processes for Tesla, from purchase to manufacturing and inventory.
Someone is trying to steal Tesla’s software
In a new case brought to the Northern California District court, Tesla claims that a recently hired software engineer, Alex Khatilov, stole his WARP Drive software.
Tesla writes in the process:
“Tesla hired Defendant as a software automation engineer on December 28, 2020. Within three days, he started stealing thousands of highly sensitive software files from Tesla’s secure internal network, transferring them to his personal cloud storage account. on Dropbox, for which Tesla does not have access or visibility. The files consist of proprietary software code “scripts” that Tesla spent years of engineering to build. These scripts, when executed, automate a wide range of functions across the Tesla business. Only selected Tesla employees have access to these files; and as a member of that group, the defendant took advantage of this access to downloaded files unrelated to his work. “
The automakers seem to have strong evidence that Khatilov downloaded the scripts inappropriately.
Tesla’s infosec team gained access to the engineer’s Dropbox account, where they found the files that shouldn’t have been there:
“Tesla’s information security personnel detected the defendant’s unauthorized download on January 6, 2021 and confronted the defendant that day and interviewed him. During that interview, he repeatedly stated that he had transferred only a few personal administrative documents. After being warned, he gave Tesla investigators access to view his Dropbox account, where they found the Defendant’s claims to be complete lies: Tesla investigators found thousands upon thousands of Tesla’s confidential computer scripts in his Dropbox. The defendant then claimed that he somehow “forgot” about the thousands of other files he stole (almost certainly another lie). Worse, it was clear that the Defendant had shamelessly tried to destroy the evidence, hastily excluding the Dropbox client and other files during the beginning of the interview, when investigators were trying to remotely access his computer. “
Tesla employs a team of quality assurance engineers who help identify business tasks to be automated based on information from Tesla’s business leaders. Engineers write computer scripts in Python (a computer programming language) to automate these tasks and test automated processes to ensure they work correctly. These scripts are exclusive to Tesla and run on WARP Drive, the back-end software for much of Tesla’s business.
The development of this complex system is expensive and time-consuming. Tesla spent about 200 man-years of work developing the quality assurance scripts – the cumulative hours spent by the quality assurance engineering team over the past twelve years. Engineers’ work is also guided by Tesla’s business leaders, who identify which tasks need to be automated – another big and valuable investment of their time.
Tesla is looking for damages to be determined at trial and an injunction to block the defendant from sharing any information with other parties.
Here is the full claim filed with the court:
It is not the first time that Tesla has asked the court to protect its trade secrets from former employees who allegedly stole important information.
Tesla sued employees alleging that they stole the Autopilot source code and then went to Xpeng, a Chinese electric vehicle maker.
The automaker also sued Zoox and is currently involved in a lawsuit with Rivian over similar allegations of IP theft.
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