Anthony Levandowski, the former head of Google's autonomous vehicle unit who was at the center of the company's high-profile dispute with Uber Technologies, has been hit with federal trade-secret theft charges.

In an indictment returned Aug. 15 and unsealed Monday, Levandowski faces 33 counts of stealing or trying to steal Google's trade secrets. The indictment claims that Levandowski, a founding member of Google's "Project Chauffeur" autonomous vehicle project, had decided to leave the company no later than September 2015 and used the time up until his January 2017 departure to take thousands of company files from Google.

"All of us have the right to change jobs," said U.S. Attorney David Anderson of the Northern District of California, in a press statement announcing the charges. "None of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door. Theft is not innovation."