Enlarge / Yatskov worked near Tesla headquarters in Fremont, California.
Michael Vi/Getty
Tesla on Friday sued a former thermal engineer for stealing trade secrets. The company accused ex-employee Alexander Yatskov of transferring confidential information from Tesla’s network to his private laptop.
Yatskov was hired in January to work on Dojo, the supercomputer Tesla is building to train its self-driving software. Tesla collects huge amounts of real-world camera data from its customers’ vehicles. Dojo will use this data to train the neural networks that power Autopilot, Tesla’s self-driving software.
According to Tesla, Yatskov was assigned to a team that “performs complex simulations of how different thermal designs affect heat distribution, which in turn affects the balance between speed, performance, safety, cost and environmental considerations.”
Tesla says Yatskov was caught transferring confidential details about Project Dojo from Tesla’s network to a PC. The company put him on administrative leave in April.
At the confrontation, Yatskov reportedly admitted taking confidential information and promised to bring his personal laptop in for inspection by Tesla’s security personnel. But according to Tesla, Yatskov didn’t bring a laptop that he had used regularly in the previous weeks. Instead, he brought a “dummy” laptop that has hardly been used since 2020.
Tesla claims Yatskov logged into the laptop only once in 2022: the morning he brought it in. He is said to have littered it with harmless Tesla documents to make it appear as if he hadn’t stolen Tesla’s secrets. Yatskov resigned from Tesla on Monday, May 2nd.
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Yatskov declined to comment
Tesla’s complaint states that Yatskov lives in Manteca, California. LinkedIn lists an Alexander Yatskov who lives in Manteca and has worked as a Thermal Engineer at Juniper Networks since March 2016. Yatskov is named in several Juniper patents.
Yatskov previously spent a decade at supercomputer manufacturer Cray and then a decade at a Massachusetts company called Thermal Form and Function. Yatskov earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Moscow State University. In 2011, while working in Massachusetts, he earned a master’s degree in engineering management from Tufts University.
Yatskov’s LinkedIn page shows he still works at Juniper Networks, but it seems unlikely that there were two thermal engineers named Alexander Yatskov in Manteca, California. Maybe he just didn’t update his LinkedIn page when he first started working at Tesla.
But I wanted to make sure – and give Yatskov a chance to comment on this story. His LinkedIn page links to a consulting firm called Robust Cooling Technologies. So I called the phone number listed on the company’s website. A man with a heavy – possibly Russian – accent answered the phone and introduced himself as Alexander Yatskov. When I said I’m a reporter calling about the Tesla lawsuit, there was a long pause.
“No comment,” he finally said.
I asked him to at least confirm that I had reached the same Alexander Yatskov who was being sued by Tesla. “No comment,” he repeated. Then he hung up.
Tesla says it doesn’t know how much information its former employee took with it or what he intends to do with it. Tesla sued Yatskov under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, a 2016 law that strengthened trade secret protections. The company requested an order for the return of the stolen information and an award of Tesla damages.
Tim Lee was an Ars associate from 2017 to 2021. In 2021 he launched Full Stack Economics, an independent email newsletter about business, technology and public policy. You can subscribe to his newsletter here.