Tesla is suing a former engineer for allegedly stealing the supercomputer’s secrets
Tesla is suing former engineer Alexander Yatskov for allegedly stealing “confidential and well-guarded” information related to the company’s supercomputer technology, called Project Dojo, as first reported by Bloomberg. In a copy of the complaint, Tesla accuses Yatskov of having downloaded the information to his personal devices and refused to return it.
Yatskov, who Tesla claims lied on his CV about his work history and skills, started working for the electric car manufacturer as a thermal engineer in January and helped design Dojo’s cooling systems. Dojo is Tesla̵[ads1]7;s neural web training computer that processes large amounts of data used to train the AI software in Tesla’s self-driving cars. According to the complaint, Yatskov had access to Dojo’s cooling information, as well as other confidential information related to the project.
Tesla says all engineers sign a confidentiality agreement to prevent them from disclosing or storing confidential information about the Dojo, which Tesla says Yatskov has violated by allegedly “removing Tesla’s confidential information from work units and accounts, accessing it on their own personal devices” , and create Tesla documents that contain confidential Project Dojo details on a personal computer. ” The company also says it discovered Yatskov sending e-mails with classified Tesla information from his personal e-mail address to his job e-mail.
As mentioned in the complaint, Tesla Yatskov claims to have stored classified information on his personal devices when the company confronted him about the situation. The electric car manufacturer then put Yatskov on administrative leave from April 6, 2022, and asked him to take in his units so that Tesla could recover all the stolen information. Yatskov responded by allegedly giving Tesla a “dummy” laptop in an attempt to hide evidence against him. This alleged lure did not contain any of the relevant information, and was made to “look as if it could only have access to obscene Tesla information, as an offer letter.”
Yatskov resigned from his position on 2 May. Tesla is suing Yatskov for compensatory and exemplary damages, and is also seeking a court order that will force Yatskov to return the classified information.
