Tesla Inc. sued a former engineer with the company’s highly secretive Optimus program, accusing him of stealing confidential information about the humanoid robot and setting up a rival startup in Silicon Valley.
Zhongjie “Jay” Li worked at Tesla between August 2022 and September 2024, according to a complaint filed in a San Francisco Federal Court late on Wednesday. Li worked on “advanced robotic hand sensors—and was entrusted with some of the most sensitive technical data in the program,” Tesla’s lawyers said in the complaint. The suit, also filed against his company Proception Inc, alleges that in the weeks before his departure, Li downloaded Optimus-related files onto two personal smartphones and then formed his own firm. “Less than a week after he left Tesla, Proception was incorporated,” according to the complaint. “And within just five months, Proception publicly claimed to have ‘successfully built’ advanced humanoid robotic hands—-hands that bear a striking resemblance to the designs Li worked on at Tesla.”

Full repor t: Tesla sues ex-Optimus engineer Zhongjie Li, who worked at Tesla from 2022 to 2024, accusing him of stealing humanoid robot info and setting up a rival startup.