Tesla is taking one of its former employees to court for allegedly stealing company information and violating a contract, CNBC reports.
According to a process filed Friday, Tesla claims that software engineer Alex Khatilov silently diverted the software code and files from Tesla’s internal Warp Drive system while working on quality ansecurity team. The complaint says he started working for the company in December and within a few days began to send “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 says the stolen material can reveal to competitors “which Tesla systems it believes are important and valuable to automate and how to automate them – providing a roadmap for copying Tesla’s innovation,” according to the process. The code in question took about “200 man-years of work” to develop, says Tesla.
When confronted by Tesla investigators on January 6, Khatilov said he simply “forgot” that he had transferred the files to his personal Dropbox. He elaborated further on a New York Post interview that the whole thing 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 work with Tesla’s QA team, which involved helping to automate tasks related to the company’s Environment, Health and Safety systems. When trying to make a backup copy of a folder containing the internal document cache, he “accidentally” moved it to his Dropbox by mistake.
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“I didn’t know there were 26,000 files there,” he told the agency. He didn’t even know that Tesla had filed a lawsuit against him until the Post contacted him.
Honestly, it is not hard to believe. Tesla fiercely protects its proprietary data and has a history of lawsuits whenever it realizes that its secret sauce may be at risk. Tesla accused another ex-employee, Guangzhi Cao, to steal the source code related to your Autopilot system in 2018, and that process is still being judged. Tesla also sued the autonomous startup Zoox in 2019 and the electric automaker Rivian in 2020, allegedly stealing trade secrets. Last April, Zoox made a deal with Tesla for an undisclosed sum and admitted that “some of its new Tesla contractors” were in possession of Tesla’s internal documents.