A former Uber employee's description of spying on rivals and destroying evidence caused chaos in a San Francisco courtroom earlier this week.
The trial between Uber and Waymo scheduled to begin next week has been delayed by order of the judge, who scolded Uber for withholding evidence, according to media reports.
The allegations of cloak-and-dagger tactics at Uber, the ride-hailing giant that has been accused of stealing trade secrets involving self-driving cars from Waymo, seemed straight out of a spy novel. And the events in court added more uncertainty into a high-profile lawsuit between two of the tech industry's most powerful players.
Judge William Alsup delayed the upcoming trial, originally scheduled for December 4, saying it would be a "huge injustice" to force Waymo to go to trial given the new evidence that surfaced in the case, according to Reuters and other accounts from the hearing.
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The closely watched case puts two of the tech industry's most powerful companies against each other at a time when each is racing to develop self-driving cars that could upend the automobile and transportation industries.
Waymo, the autonomous-car subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, sued Uber in February, alleging that a former Waymo exec Anthony Levandowski shared confidential files with Uber. Levandowski left his role at Waymo in January 2016 to found another self-driving-car company, Otto, which was acquired by Uber in August 2016.
Most of the allegations in the case date to the period when Uber was led by CEO Travis Kalanick, the co-founder who was ousted earlier this year amid criticism that the company had fostered a toxic work culture and allowed sexual harassment to flourish.
Credit: Business Insider