A federal judge ruled Monday that Anthony Levandowski, the engineer leading Uber’s self-driving car efforts, must stop work for the ride-hailing company while a lawsuit against him is litigated. The suit was brought by Levandowski’s former employer, Alphabet’s self-driving car subsidiary Waymo, and alleges that he stole key technology from the company before resigning to found Otto, an autonomous truck startup that was acquired by Uber shortly after its founding. The judge in the case stopped short of demanding that Uber stop all work on its self-driving car technology.
Uber released the following statement in response to the ruling:
“We are pleased with the court’s ruling that Uber can continue building and utilizing all of its self-driving technology, including our innovation around LiDAR. We look forward to moving toward trial and continuing to demonstrate that our technology has been built independently from the ground up.”
