Uber has dropped its vice president of technology, Anthony Levandowski, after he failed to cooperate in a lawsuit involving the tech company and Alphabet’s Waymo, according to the New York Times.
The report said that Levandowski’s leave, which began Tuesday, was announced in an internal email sent to employees the same day.
The engineer was one of the people at the lead of Uber’s self-driving car project and was a key factor in a lawsuit with Alphabet. In the court case, Waymo alleged that Uber took trade secrets by hiring
Levandowski, a former Google engineer.
Uber said in the case that Waymo’s claims were false, but when Levandowski was asked to bring forward evidence and a testimony by a federal judge, the engineer pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Uber seemingly couldn’t convince him to do otherwise.
“Over the last few months Uber has provided significant evidence to the court to demonstrate that our self-driving technology has been built independently,” said Uber associate general counsel for employment Angela Padilla in an internal email, according to NYT. “Over that same period, Uber has urged Anthony to fully cooperate in helping the court get to the facts and ultimately helping to prove our case.”