- Tesla on Friday filed a complaint accusing an engineer of stealing trade secrets.
- Tesla said engineer Alex Khatilov was hired on December 28 and started transferring files within days.
- Alex Khatilov denies the allegations, according to reports.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Tesla, in a lawsuit on Friday, said a software engineer transferred some 26,000 confidential documents, including trade secrets, to his personal Dropbox during his first week at the company.
Senior software quality assurance engineer Alex Khaitov started work at Tesla on December 28, 2020 and almost immediately started downloading confidential files, according to Tesla.
“Three days after being hired by Tesla, the defendant shamelessly stole thousands of computer secrets of trade secrets that took Tesla years to develop,” said Tesla in a complaint filed Friday at the San Jose Division of the United States district court. States of the Northern California District.
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Tesla is suing Khaitov, accusing him of stealing trade secrets and confidential information and violating his contract. Khatilov was fired when internal investigators discovered the file transfers, according to Tesla.
Alex Khatilov denies the allegations, according to a MailOnline report.
Tesla Model Y.
Tesla
Khatilov became the last person in Silicon Valley to be accused of stealing Tsa’s trade secret thefts. Former Tesla employees who worked at Zoox were sued in 2019.
In March 2020, Tesla sued a competitor, Rivian, saying its employees also stole trade secrets. And Martin Tripp, a former Tesla process technician, was set to pay the company $ 400,000 for sharing trade secrets, according to a December court case.
Only about 40 people on Khatilov’s team of quality assurance engineers had access to the trade secrets he is accused of stealing, according to Tesla. Within that group, only 8 engineers could grant access to the files, the company said.
The company said it detected Khatilov’s downloads on January 6.
Khatilov gave the company’s investigators access to his Dropbox, saying he only transferred “some personal administrative documents”, according to Tesla.
Tesla said its investigators viewed its Dropbox account. They found his “allegations to be lies”, saying he transferred “thousands upon thousands” of Tesla’s computer scripts to his personal Dropbox.
Tesla said: “So, he lied about it and tried to exclude evidence of his theft when he was quickly confronted by Tesla’s security team, forcing Tesla to file this complaint.”
The company said Khatilov told company investigators that he “forgot” the files, adding that it was “almost certainly another lie”.
On Friday, Khatilov spoke to The New York Post, saying, “I’ve been working for, like, 20 years in this industry and I know what confidential documents are about, and I’ve never, ever tried to access any of them, or steal it. “
The Post said Khatilov learned of the process from his reporter. An interview request sent by Insider to Khatilov’s personal email address was not immediately returned on Saturday.
In its lawsuit, Tesla said it instructed Khatilov to delete files he could see in his Dropbox account. But the company was not sure that the engineer had already transferred them elsewhere.
Tesla said: “In fact, as soon as the Defendant uploaded the stolen files to his Dropbox account, he could have shared or re-transferred those files to anyone or any other storage media (be it an external thumb drive, another computer, a device mobile or other cloud-based storage system). And Tesla would have no way of knowing that. “
The company said that investigators had to interview Khatilov remotely because of COVID-19, meaning that they were unable to “guarantee complete exclusion” of their devices.
The company is seeking a jury trial and compensation.