Tesla sues former Optimus engineer over alleged trade secret theft

Tesla sued a former engineer for allegedly stealing trade secrets from its humanoid robotics program, Optimus, and using them to launch a rival startup.

The lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday and originally reported on by Bloomberg, accuses Zhongjie “Jay” Li of stealing trade secrets regarding Tesla’s development of “advanced robotic hand sensors” to launch his startup Proception, a Y Combinator-backed company building robotic hands.

The complaint states that Li, who worked at Tesla from August 2022 to September 2024, downloaded confidential information about Optimus on two separate personal smartphones.

The complaint also added that during the last few months of his time at Tesla, Li researched “humanoid robotic hands” on his workplace computer in addition to making internet searches regarding venture capital and other startup funding sources.

“Less than a week after he left Tesla, Proception was incorporated,” the complaint stated. “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.”

Proception’s website states the company is working to “revolutionize human-robot interaction by building the world’s most advanced humanoid hands.”

TechCrunch reached out to Proception and Tesla for more information.

Tesla’s Optimus robotics program has been on a bit of a rocky path since the company unveiled it was building a humanoid robot, Tesla Bot, in 2021. In 2022, the company said that the bot, alongside other new products, would be introduced in 2023. But Optimus has remained in development.

In July 2024, Tesla’s Elon Musk said that the company would begin selling the robot in 2026. Just a few months later at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024, Tesla’s Optimus bots in attendance were largely controlled by humans offsite.