Uber and Waymo have reached a settlement in their trade secrets lawsuit, lawyers for the companies told a federal court in San Francisco Friday morning.
Waymo, which was Google’s self-driving car program, had alleged its former engineer Anthony Levandowski downloaded autonomous vehicle trade secrets and took them to Uber.
“To our friends at Alphabet: we are partners, you are an important investor in Uber, and we share a deep belief in the power of technology to change people’s lives for the better. Of course, we are also competitors. And while we won’t agree on everything going forward, we agree that Uber’s acquisition of Otto could and should have been handled differently,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement.
“… [T]he prospect that a couple of Waymo employees may have inappropriately solicited others to join Otto, and that they may have potentially left with Google files in their possession, in retrospect, raised some hard questions. … To be clear, while we do not believe that any trade secrets made their way from Waymo to Uber, nor do we believe that Uber has used any of Waymo’s proprietary information in its self-driving technology, we are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work.”
This story is developing …