Tesla has filed a lawsuit against a former employee, alleging that secrets about its “supercomputer” project were illegally copied onto his personal devices.
The “electric car giant” alleges that Alexander Yatskov, a former thermal engineer hired to work specifically on the “Dojo” project, gave up a “fake” laptop to hide his actions, after he was confronted with his actions, according to the American “Bloomberg” agency.
Billionaire Tesla President Elon Musk has been promoting the Dojo project since 2019, which focuses on developing a supercomputer, fed with data from Tesla users, and which aims to help the company solve complex engineering problems, such as autonomous driving. .
Tesla also alleges that Alexander Yatskov, who was hired in January to help design the supercomputer’s cooling systems, violated a nondisclosure agreement by keeping confidential information.
In a complaint filed in US District Court on Friday, Tesla said Yatskoff lied about his work history and experience on his resume, and that he had “repeatedly been unable” to complete the tasks he was assigned to do.
The complaint also noted that Yatskov “confessed” that he kept information about Project Dojo in his personal devices, but that he tried to make the laptop appear to have only accessed “harmless” Tesla information.
The suit alleges that the thermal engineer, who resigned in May, was “creating Tesla Documents” containing sensitive information about Project Dojo, and sharing it to his personal email address.
Tesla confirmed that the Dojo team spent “thousands of hours of work” to develop trade secrets for Tesla, which are not public and are not shared outside the company.
She stressed in her lawsuit that her secrets are very important to her, and could be to her competitors.
“Access to Tesla’s secrets will enable engineers at other companies to reverse-engineer its trade secrets in order to create similar giant thermal systems in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost it took Tesla to build,” it said in a statement.
For his part, Alexander Yatskov told Bloomberg that he was not aware of the lawsuit brought against him by Tesla, and declined to comment.