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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowColumbus, Indiana-based Cummins Inc. must pay $23.3 million in damages to a California-based tech firm that had accused the manufacturer of stealing its trade secrets, a jury decided.
The case traces back to November 2023, when Redwood City, California-based C3.ai Inc. filed suit against Cummins. C3 develops artificial-intelligence-powered applications for clients, and Cummins had been one of the company’s clients.
The jury returned its verdict May 19, concluding a seven-day civil trial. The case was handled in Delaware Superior Court.
“We’re pleased with how the jury saw the case,” said John Sensing, a Delaware attorney who represented C3.
Responding via email to an IBJ query, Cummins spokeswoman Melinda Koski said, “Cummins respects the jury’s role and the legal process but disagrees with the outcome of the case and stands by its commitment to conduct business with integrity and respect of the law.”
Koski did not answer a specific question about whether Cummins plans to file an appeal.
Because the case involved an intellectual property dispute, many of the records associated with the case were filed under seal.
But in C3’s November 2023 complaint, the company said Cummins had hired it in 2020 to develop an application that would reduce the fuel consumption of Cummins’ diesel truck engines.
Under the terms of the agreement, C3 alleged, Cummins agreed to pay licensing fees to use the C3 app, while C3 would retain its ownership of the intellectual property.
According to C3’s complaint, the parties agreed that the C3 application and the project work would be hosted on Cummins servers, which meant that Cummins had access to the applications source code. The agreement also specified that the product and the work were to be kept confidential and that reverse engineering of the product was prohibited.
C3 alleged that Cummins secretly hired an India-based AI team to build a replica version of the C3 technology, then canceled the C3 contract in April 2023.
C3 said it found out what was happening when Cummins accidentally copied it on an internal Cummins email.
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