Tesla Sued Ex-employee For Uploading 300,000 Autopilot Source Code Files To iCloud
Tesla filed a lawsuit against its former employee in March, who was allegedly stealing source codes of Tesla’s Autopilot technology.
In a recent filing, Tesla alleged that Guangzhi Cao transferred zip files of the Autopilot source code to his iCloud last year, for which Cao was sued by Tesla. The information included more than 300,000 files and directories, including firmware, Autopilot, and neural network source code repositories.
The filing suggests that Cao stole important documents last year, deleted around 120,000 files in December, deleted proof of the theft and left Tesla on January 3.
Cao has been also accused of sharing information with Chinese autonomous car-maker Xiaopeng Motors, which is backed by Alibaba.
However, Xiaopeng has said that the company respects other companies’ intellectual property and has not tried to extract Tesla’s secret information.
Furthermore, Cao revealed that he got an offer from Xiaopeng Motors on December 12. Currently, he works as “Head of Perception” at the Chinese car startup.
While Tesla accuses Cao of poaching a Tesla employee to his new company, Cao denies the allegations.