Maraaz 
Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison, was among the names that US President Donald Trump pardoned when he left office.
Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison while leaving the Presidency of Donald Trump, also pardoned.
The amnesty was also supported by many names from Silicon Valley, including investor Peter Thiel and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.
According to the news in the British broadcaster BBC, Levandowski was accused of stealing information about driverless cars from Google when he was working at Google before founding the autonomous truck company Otto.
At the time of his sentence in August, the judge declared that it was the biggest trade secret crime he had ever seen. The judge also described Levandowski as “a brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs”.
These statements were also included in the Trump administration’s amnesty note. In the last hours of his presidency, Trump pardoned 73 people, including Anthony Levandowski.
Levandowski had not started his sentence due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
In February 2017, Google’s parent company Alphabet sued Uber for data theft, while the case was resolved in 2018.
Levandowski had taken over 14,000 files involving the intellectual property of Waymo, Google’s former driverless car division, before leaving as an employee to form Otto, which was soon acquired by Uber.
Levandowski continued to run Uber’s autonomous vehicle project during this period, but he was fired in 2017 due to the lawsuit.
Levandowski denied the charges against him.
