A Delaware jury has ordered Columbus-based Cummins Inc. to pay more than $23 million after finding the engine maker misappropriated trade secrets tied to a fuel-economy artificial-intelligence application developed by C3.ai. The verdict followed a seven-day trial in Wilmington and marks a rare courtroom win for a smaller AI vendor going up against a major industrial licensor. C3.ai says the dispute grew out of a 2020 partnership in which its code was hosted on Cummins systems and, the company alleges, later copied and reproduced.
In a press release, C3.ai said the Superior Court jury returned a unanimous verdict on May 19, 2026, awarding about $23.3 million for trade-secret misappropriation and breach of contract. According to a press release posted on Nasdaq, jurors concluded Cummins misused access to the application's source code that it obtained under a licensing arrangement.
How C3 Says It Happened
C3.ai's complaint alleges that after hiring the company in 2020 to build an AI tool to reduce fuel consumption, Cummins secretly engaged a separate AI team in India to recreate the software and then terminated the C3.ai contract once the replica was ready, reporting by the Indianapolis Business Journal says. C3.ai says it first learned of the plan when staff were accidentally copied on an internal Cummins email and initially estimated potential damages between $500 million and $1 billion. The law firm that represented C3.ai, Crowell & Moring, called the conduct a "secret scheme across two continents" and said the verdict vindicated its client.
What The Jury Found
The jury determined Cummins misappropriated five of the six trade secrets at issue and breached the parties' software-service agreement, awarding roughly $23.3 million in total. Bloomberg Law reports the verdict form allocated $2 million for each of four secrets and about $15.3 million for theft of trial-code modules.
Reactions And Next Steps
C3.ai chairman and CEO Thomas Siebel called the verdict a rebuke of Cummins' executive management and thanked jurors for their service in statements released by the company. Cummins said it "respects the jury's role and the legal process but disagrees with the outcome" and that it stands by its commitment to conduct business with integrity, a company spokesperson told WFYI. Both parties offered limited public comment after the decision, and additional filings are possible as the case moves forward.
Legal Implications
The ruling underscores the legal risk when vendors host proprietary AI code on customer systems: if an industrial partner tries to recreate that functionality in house, it can trigger trade-secret and contract exposure. The Crowell & Moring statement argues the unanimous verdict will strengthen protections for enterprise AI vendors and could push manufacturers to tighten licensing, confidentiality and access controls.
For Cummins the award is modest in dollar terms relative to the size of the company, but it arrives amid other high-profile legal matters that have drawn scrutiny of the firm's governance and compliance, the Indianapolis Business Journal previously reported. The case is a notable public win for an AI firm asserting ownership of model code and leaves broader questions about how industrial companies and AI vendors will structure future partnerships and protect proprietary systems.
