Tesla allegedly took one of its former employees to court for alleged theft of company information and breach of contract, CNBC reports.
According to an lawsuit submitted on Friday, Tesla claims software engineer Alex Khatilov quietly siphoned software code and files from Tesla’s internal Warp Drive system while working on the company quality assurance team. According to the complaint, he started 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 car manufacturing and sales. The company claims the stolen material could reveal to competitors “what systems Tesla finds important and valuable to automate and how to automate them – and provides a roadmap to copy Tesla’s innovation,” the lawsuit said. It took an estimated “200 man-years of work” to develop the code in question, Tesla claims.
When Khatilov was confronted by Tesla investigators on January 6, he claimed he simply “ forgot ” that he transferred the files to his personal Dropbox. He elaborated further in one 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 be working with them as part of his work with Tesla’s QA team, which was involved in helping automate tasks related to the environment, health and safety systems of the company. While backing up a folder with the cache of internal documents, he “accidentally” accidentally moved it to his Dropbox.
G / O Media can receive a commission
“I didn’t know there were 26,000 files there,” he told the outlet. He didn’t even know Tesla had sued him until the Post contacted him.
To be honest, that’s not hard to believe. Tesla is fiercely protective of its proprietary data and has a history of dishing out lawsuits when it gets the slightest odor that its secret sauce could be compromised. Tesla accused another former employee, Guangzhi Cao, of stealing source code related to the Autopilot system in 2018, and that lawsuit is still being settled in court. Tesla also sued the self-driving startup Zoox in 2019 and the electric automaker Rivian in 2020 about reportedly moving away with trade secrets. Last April, Zoox settled a settlement with Tesla for an undisclosed amount, admitting that “certain of its new hires at Tesla” were in possession of internal Tesla documents.