Tesla sued a former engineer for allegedly stealing commerce secrets and techniques from its humanoid robotics program, Optimus, and utilizing them to launch a rival startup.
The lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday and initially reported on by Bloomberg, accuses Zhongjie “Jay” Li of stealing commerce secrets and techniques concerning Tesla’s improvement of “superior robotic hand sensors” to launch his startup Proception, a Y Combinator-backed firm constructing robotic palms.
The grievance states that Li, who labored at Tesla from August 2022 to September 2024, downloaded confidential details about Optimus on two separate private smartphones.
The grievance additionally added that in the previous couple of months of his time at Tesla, Li researched “humanoid robotic palms” on his office pc along with making web searches concerning enterprise capital and different startup funding sources.
“Lower than every week after he left Tesla, Proception was integrated,” the grievance said. “And inside simply 5 months, Proception publicly claimed to have ‘efficiently constructed’ superior humanoid robotic palms—-hands that bear a placing resemblance to the designs Li labored on at Tesla.”
Proception’s web site states the corporate is working to “revolutionize human-robot interplay by constructing the world’s most superior humanoid palms.”
TechCrunch reached out to Proception and Tesla for extra data.
Tesla’s Optimus robotics program has been on a little bit of a rocky path for the reason that firm unveiled it was constructing a humanoid robotic, Tesla Bot, in 2021. In 2022, the corporate stated that the bot, alongside different new merchandise, could be launched in 2023. However Optimus has remained in improvement.
In July 2024, Tesla’s Elon Musk stated that the corporate would start promoting the robotic in 2026. Just some months later at Tesla’s “We, Robotic” occasion in October 2024, Tesla’s Optimus bots in attendance have been largely managed by people offsite.
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