Tesla filed on Wednesday a lawsuit against a former engineer working on its Optimus program until September 2024.
The company accuses Zhongjie (Jay) Li of stealing confidential information about the humanoid robot.
The engineer created a firm called Proception, which develops advanced humanoid hands. Proception is also a defendant in the case, due to unlawful trade misappropriation.
According to the Elon Musk-led company, Li, who worked at Tesla for two years, was in charge of “advanced robotic hand sensors — and [he] was entrusted with some of the most sensitive technical data in the program.”
The company claims that Proception was founded “less than a week after he left Tesla” and “publicly claimed to have ‘successfully built’ advanced humanoid robotic hands” within five months.
The case was brought before a San Francisco Federal Court.
Tesla‘s lawyers said that Proception’s robotic hands have a “striking resemblance to the designs Li worked on” at the company.
According to Bloomberg, one of the exhibits attached to the complaint contains an email sent to the Optimus team in August 2024, reminding employees that Tesla‘s IT systems and networks are subject to monitoring.
The email stated that “incidents of mishandling or suspected theft of Tesla property, including data and code, will be thoroughly investigated.”
Tesla alleged that in the weeks before his departure, Li downloaded Optimus-related files onto two personal smartphones.
The conduct is seen by the company as “a calculated effort to exploit Tesla‘s investments, insights, and intellectual property for their own commercial gain.”
Proception was established in September 2024, according to Jay Li’s LinkedIn page, where he says he is the founder and CEO of the company.
It is headquartered in Palo Alto, California — where Tesla’s lab is located.
The company aims to “revolutionize humanoid hands, redefine dexterity, and usher in a humanoid civilization” and sets 2028 as the timeline to deploy humanoid robots to the market.
Elon Musk stated at the company’s latest earnings call that “the future of the company is fundamentally based on large-scale autonomous cars (…) and autonomous humanoid robots.”
The chief executive expects to “have thousands of Optimus robots working in Tesla factories by the end of this year” and to reach 1 million units by the end of the decade.
Last month, Tesla released a video showing one of its Optimus robots dancing. By then, Musk stated on X that the humanoids “do this every day in our Palo Alto lab.”
According to him, “multiple Optimus robots walk around the office 24/7 with no one watching over them, charging themselves as needed.”
