Prosecutors in the United States say Anthony Levandowski should spend 27 months in prison after stealing autonomous vehicle-related trade secrets from Google and defecting to Uber.
While speaking with a judge ahead of Levandowski’s sentencing next week, government lawyers said the sentence would serve as an important lesson to deter “brazen and shocking” conduct in Silicon Valley.
According to prosecutors, Levandowski “raided Google’s repositories and stole proprietary information that would have undoubtedly been useful to him.” They added that he wanted to be “the savior” of Uber’s self-driving program.
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“At some level, that is what Levandowski’s actions suggest he wanted, to be seen as the singular inventor of the self-driving car, the way Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone,” they said.
Levandowski reached a plea agreement with prosecutors back in March. This came two weeks after the engineer filed for bankruptcy when Google won a $179 million settlement against him. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped 32 of 33 counts. Without the deal, he could have faced as much as 10 years in prison.
In court, Levandowski countered the prosecution, claiming that 12 months of home confinement and community service would be an acceptable punishment. His lawyer, Miles Ehrlich, also said that no evidence was found that Uber actually used any of the trade secrets that Levandowski downloaded from Google. He added that outbreaks of COVID-19 in prisons could be a death sentence for Levandowski.
