Not ever one to back down from a fight, it took Uber less than 24 hours to respond to a lawsuit alleging that it misappropriated extremely sensitive and proprietary technical data from Waymo, Google’s self-driving car division.
In a statement provided to Business Insider, Uber vehemently denies all of the allegations. Not only that, Uber articulates that the lawsuit itself is merely an underhanded and desperate attempt for Waymo to slow down Uber’s progress with respect to self-driving car technologies.
“We are incredibly proud of the progress that our team has made, an Uber spokesperson said. “We have reviewed Waymo’s claims and determined them to be a baseless attempt to slow down a competitor and we look forward to vigorously defending against them in court. In the meantime, we will continue our hard work to bring self-driving benefits to the world.”
If this case winds up in court, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t, we can certainly expect fireworks. As we detailed yesterday, Waymo’s allegations involve a concerted effort from former employees to stealthily access and download gigabytes upon gigabytes of top secret and proprietary technical information.
The most glaring accusation involves Anthony Levandowski — a former Google employee who now works at Uber by way of Otto — who allegedly absconded with 9.7GB of “confidential files and trade secrets, including blueprints, design files and testing documentation.”
Waymo notes that it didn’t file suit against Uber lightly, so this doesn’t seem like the type of dispute that will quickly dissolve with a mutually agreeable settlement agreement.
