A new court filing from Alphabet claims that Uber hid a key piece of self-driving technology that it allegedly copied from Waymo, the Google parent company’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary.
Alphabet claims Uber was hiding the self-driving technology that it allegedly ripped off
Google’s parent company continues to fight for an injunction against Uber.
Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
“They were hiding a device,” Alphabet said in a filing today, supporting its motion for a preliminary injunction that would prevent Uber from working on self-driving technology.
Uber says it isn’t hiding anything and did not infringe on Alphabet’s patents.
Alphabet has sued Uber over claims it stole its proprietary self-driving technology. At the center of the suit is a former Alphabet executive, Anthony Levandowski, who led its early efforts in developing self-driving technology.
Alphabet claims Levandowski stole 14,000 files from Alphabet before leaving to launch his own autonomous truck startup, Otto. Uber acquired Otto last August. The files include designs for Alphabet’s lidar (light detection and ranging) technology, a key component to most self-driving systems.
In the latest filing, Alphabet says Uber hid a lidar device Levandowski designed based on these files. The company says Uber obfuscated the existence of a piece of lidar technology at an April 12 hearing.
Uber denies this and says it eventually produced the device in question. A representative for Uber told Recode the company did not initially produce the device because they did not think they were required to do so as its design had been abandoned.
Alphabet has declined to say whether it has inspected the device in question.
Uber said in a previous filing opposing the preliminary injunction that Alphabet’s allegations are “demonstrably false.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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