In a post published on Medium, the team behind Waymo, Google's self-driving car project, announced that it was taking legal action against Otto and its parent company Uber for "misappropriating Waymo trade secrets and infringing our patents." The Waymo team contends that they "uncovered evidence that Otto and Uber have taken and are using key parts of Waymo’s self-driving technology." It centers on the action of one former employee named Anthony Levandowski, who according to the Waymo team, "downloaded over 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files for Waymo’s various hardware systems." The Waymo team found that the design Uber ended up using highly resembled those initial designs.
