Alex Khatilov, a former employee of electric car maker tesla, has been sued by Tesla for allegedly stealing trade secrets and violating his contract.
The financial website CNBC reported that according to the complaint, Tesla sued Khatilov because he obtained the code and files of the company’s back-end software system “WARP Drive”, and he also deleted relevant evidence when confronting the information security team.
The complaint alleges that Khatilov started working at Tesla on December 28 last year, and almost immediately uploaded the files and scripts written in Python to his Dropbox account upon arrival.
WARP Drive” is a system used by Tesla to automate a range of business processes, including manufacturing and sales. The complaint states that the theft of the code for this system raised concerns for Tesla because it could reveal to competitors “which systems Tesla considers important and valuable for automation and how to automate them – providing a roadmap for copying Tesla’s innovations.
Hatilov was initially hired to help Tesla’s quality assurance (QA) team create software that could automate work or business processes related to environmental, health and safety (EHS).
Tesla 22 revealed that of the company’s total workforce of about 50,000, the quality assurance team had only 40 members.
Khatilov 22 told the New York Post that the software files ended up in his Dropbox as an inadvertent mistake. He was trying to create a backup on his computer when the folder was inadvertently passed to Dropbox.
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