Self-driving Engineer Anthony Levandowski Receives Presidential Pardon

One of President Trump’s final pardons this week: Anthony Levandowski, former Uber self-driving lead and prolific engineer who had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google.

The backstory

Levandowski has created a driverless motorcycle and participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge. He joined Google in 2007. He left what would become Waymo to form Otto, an autonomous trucking company, which Uber acqui-hired in 2016.

• Levandowski was the central figure in Waymo v. Uber, a lawsuit focused on stolen self-driving trade secrets that the two parties quickly settled. Federal prosecutors also hit him with 33 counts of trade secret theft. He pled guilty to one count.
• The judge on Levandowski’s case referred to it as “the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen.” The judge also recommended prison time, saying a home confinement sentence would be “a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets.”

So, what’s next? Lewandowski owes $179 million to Alphabet as part of his private arbitration with the company. Our guess is that, based on prominent tech figures who lobbied for his clemency, he could be taking his talents to the defense sector.