SAN FRANCISCO - The race to develop self-driving vehicles took a new turn on Thursday when Google’s parent company Alphabet filed a lawsuit against Uber, accusing it of stealing technology.

Alphabet contends that a manager at its autonomous car subsidiary Waymo took technical data with him when he left to launch a competing venture that went on to become Otto, Uber’s self-driving vehicle unit, in a reported $680 million deal.

“Otto and Uber have taken Waymo’s intellectual property so that they could avoid incurring the risk, time and expense of independently developing their own technology,” Waymo said in a San Francisco federal court filing. Waymo is calling for a trial to stop Otto and Uber from using what it says is patented technology. Waymo also wants unspecified damages in what it described in court documents as “an action for trade secret misappropriation, patent infringement, and unfair competition.”