KATHMANDU: An ex-engineer for Google’s self-driving car unit has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for trade secret theft shortly before he joined Uber, international media reported.

Anthony Levandowski had carried out the “biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen”, said US District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco.

Levandowski is said to have loaded more than 14,000 Google files onto his laptop before leaving the firm in January 2016.

He led Uber’s robocar project, only to be fired in 2017 over this case.

(With inputs from Agencies)