Tesla sues former employee for stealing company secrets about Project ‘Dojo’

The former Tesla engineer confessed to having downloaded confidential information

May 8, 2022

Tesla accuses engineer Alexander Yatskov of stealing supercomputer secrets

Tesla Inc has sued former engineer Alexander Yatskov for allegedly stealing “confidential and tightly guarded” information related to the company’s supercomputer technology, called Project Dojo.

Dojo is Tesla’s neural net training computer that processes large amounts of data used to train the AI software in Tesla’s self-driving cars.

Tesla has sued Alexander Yatskov for downloading confidential information to his personal devices which he declined to give back. The lawsuit against Khatilov alleged that he stole files from Tesla’s internal Warp Drive software. The company also accused him of “deleting possible evidence when security teams confronted him”, according to reports.

Yatskov violated the company’s policies by “removing Tesla confidential information from work devices and accounts, accessing it on his own personal devices, and creating Tesla documents containing confidential Project Dojo details on a personal computer”.

Tesla said that it also discovered Yatskov sending emails with classified information from his personal email address to his work email. Tesla has sued Yatskov for compensatory and exemplary damages, seeking a court order for Yatskov to return the classified information.

Tesla has also claimed that Yatskov lied on his resume about his work history and skillset, started working for the electric vehicle maker as a thermal engineer in January, and aided in the design of Dojo’s cooling systems.

As noted in the complaint, Tesla claims Yatskov admitted to storing classified information on his personal devices when the company confronted him about the situation.

[With Inputs from IANS]

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