Tesla sues a former employee for allegedly taking automation files

Tesla hired and then almost immediately fired a software automation engineer earlier in January for allegedly stealing proprietary information about the electric car company. Now the company is suing the engineer.

In a court filing from Friday, Tesla sued software engineer Alex Khatilov for downloading Tesla files to his Dropbox account. Tesla claims he stole thousands of files pertaining to automation for Tesla business processes like supply chain, inventory, product planning, and more. In the suit, Tesla estimates the files represent “200 man-years of work.”

Tesla has its own backend software called WARP Drive and the company claims Khatilov, in his first three days on the job, stole system scripts, or code files in the computer programming language Python. Electrek has the U.S. District Court complaint uploaded with all the details of the suit. 

The complaint says Khatilov initially said he had only transferred administrative documents, but later claimed to have forgotten about the other files. Tesla pressured him to delete all his Tesla files from the Dropbox account, but still sued. 

The suit explains the company’s reasoning for the litigation: “Tesla does not know whether [Khatilov] took additional files, whether he copied files from the Dropbox account to other locations in the days before he was caught, or whether he sent any of the files to other persons or entities.”  

Khatilov has told the New York Post that anything that could be construed as a theft was “unintentional” and that he didn’t even know there were 26,000 files transferred to his personal online storage account. He said he deleted everything as Tesla had instructed.

This isn’t the first lawsuit accusing an employee of taking Tesla trade secrets home. In the past few years, Tesla has sued other engineers, including one case involving Autopilot data that made its way to Chinese EV company XPeng. 

Wikipedia has an updating list of Tesla “lawsuits and controversies,” like when it sued EV rival Fisker Automotive in 2008. More recently Tesla sued upcoming electric truck maker Rivian, claiming former employees joined the competing company with Tesla materials in hand.