The crown jewels have legs

By Jon David, Tettares. Commentary, not legal advice.

When people ask where the value sits in a humanoid robot, they expect you to point at a wall of patents. The more interesting answer is the people who leave the building at 6 p.m. In physical AI, the most valuable intellectual property is rarely the thing that has been filed and published. It is the unfiled, unpatented process knowledge that lives in a handful of engineers’ heads and a few machines on a factory floor. That makes it enormously valuable and legally fragile at the same time. Trade secrets have no expiry, but they also have no perimeter. They protect you right up until they walk out the door.

The case that made this concrete. On 11 June 2025, Tesla sued a former Optimus engineer, Zhongjie “Jay” Li, and his startup Proception in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging he downloaded confidential data on robotic-hand sensors in his final months and used it to build a competitor Reported · 0.8. Li worked on Optimus from roughly August 2022 to September 2024. Proception was incorporated within days of his departure and, months later, showed dexterous hands Tesla says resemble its own designs Reported · 0.8. The parties later settled, and Proception announced an $11M seed round the same day Reported · 0.8. Two cautions: a complaint is an allegation, not a finding, and a settlement is not an admission. But strip the names away and you have the defining IP pattern of this sector. The crown jewels are portable, and the talent market is on fire.