Ambitious engineer at centre of colossal fight between Google and Uber

In 2013, Anthony was the star of Google’s self-driving car project. The tall, swaggering engineer was featured in a long New Yorker story about the search engine willing the impossible technology into reality.

Less than four years later, he is Google’s enemy number one. 

Waymo’s lawsuit hinges on a series of alleged moves from Levandowski in the days leading up to his departure from Alphabet in January 2016. His web searches, downloads and access to an external drive left behind digital footprints. When exposed, they were closely scrutinised by his former employer — which is now citing them as central to its lawsuit, a rare intellectual property claim from Alphabet.

The prodigious engineer has spent much of his career chasing a dream of placing robotic cars on the road. While at the University of California at Berkeley, he entered a self-driving motorcycle in the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, a historic event for the young field. 

He also started 510 Systems, a robotics firm building lasers for autonomous vehicles. The start-up once ran a stunt with a self-driving pizza car. Levandowski started at Google in 2007, working on its Street View unit, where he played an instrumental role in building its mapping hardware to fit on cars.

After being recruited to its secretive car project, he continued to work on 510 Systems, according to two people familiar with the situation. Google eventually acquired the start-up as it pushed deeper into self-driving technology.

Years later, Waymo would detail how Levandowski had secretly plotted his next start-up, Otto, while also working for Google. Uber acquired Otto in August for $680 million.