Outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned Anthony Levandowski, saving the engineer from more than a year in prison for stealing trade secrets from his former employer, Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo.

Autonomous driving engineer Anthony Levandowski was ordered to spend 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google as he defected to Uber Technologies Inc., in one of the highest-profile criminal cases to hit Silicon Valley.

Autonomous technology developer Anthony Levandowski has pleaded guilty to federal theft of trade secrets charges, according to documents filed in federal court March 19.

Anthony Levandowski, one of Silicon Valley’s most highly prized engineers, filed for bankruptcy after Google won a $179 million award against him over his defection to Uber Technologies Inc.

Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi said Aug. 29 that “it sure looked like” former executive Anthony Levandowski took information on self-driving cars from his former employer, Google.

Autonomous technology pioneer Anthony Levandowski was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he stole trade secrets from Google that he later used on other projects, including the Otto self-driving truck.

Pronto, the new self-driving truck startup launched by Anthony Levandowski, is pursuing a more incremental path toward autonomous driving than many of its competitors in the increasingly crowded race to bring automation to trucking.

Uber Technologies Inc. said it didn’t know about the alleged theft of proprietary information from Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous driving unit by an executive until Waymo filed a lawsuit in February.

Uber Technologies Inc. threatened to fire the man at the center of its legal battle with Alphabet Inc., telling its top driverless technology engineer, Anthony Levandowski, to either deny taking files from his former employer or turn them over.

Panelists discuss liability in an accident during the "Autonomous Trucking: How Soon? How Disruptive?" panel at ATA's Management Conference & Exhibition in Las Vegas Oct. 4, 2016.