Anthony Levandowski files motion to force Uber into arbitration, alleging Uber must shoulder $179M judgment against him as part of its 2016 indemnity agreement
Anthony Levandowski, the star self-driving car engineer who was at the center of a trade secrets lawsuit, has filed a motion … Tweets: @lorakolodny and @dtunkelang Tweets: Lora Kolodny / @lorakolodny : Meanwhile Levandowski did WHAT? by @kirstenkorosec https://techcrunch.com/... Daniel Tunkelang / @dtunkelang : Anthony Levandowski and Uber are fighting over an indemnity agreement to determine who has to pay Google $179 million for Levandowski's theft of Google's self-driving technology trade secrets. Pass the popcorn. https://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This fight is the endgame of the Waymo-Uber saga's legal tail. After Google revealed Levandowski made over $120M in incentive pay while allegedly working on competing projects before leaving, Uber threatened to fire him rather than shield him from the court's file-return order, and the Justice Department later hit him with 33 counts of trade-secret theft. Now that a $179M judgment against him exists, the question is no longer guilt but who foots the bill.
Levandowski's move leans on an irony in the record: Waymo itself first pursued arbitration with Levandowski over employee poaching before suing Uber, so he is asking a second arbitration forum — this time under a 2016 indemnity agreement with Uber — to shift the judgment onto his former new employer.
First-order effects
- Levandowski and Uber are now direct adversaries over money: if the arbitrator upholds his reading of the 2016 indemnity agreement, Uber absorbs the $179M judgment instead of its former star engineer.
Second-order effects
- The outcome sets the price of indemnity clauses for every company that hired aggressively out of a rival's autonomous-driving program — Waymo collects the full amount either way, but the fight determines whether poaching employers or the individual engineer carry the downside.
Third-order effects
- If indemnified hires become the norm after high-stakes talent raids, self-driving companies will treat litigation exposure as a hiring cost to be contractually allocated, and executive disputes will migrate from public courts into private arbitration — a structure Waymo already pioneered with Levandowski.
The trend: The autonomous-vehicle talent wars are moving from public courtroom battles over stolen IP to private fights over who contractually owes the damages, with arbitration clauses deciding where the bill lands.