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How it started
Last year, two of the leading air taxi companies in the US, Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, sued each other, with Joby accusing Archer of corporate espionage and Archer claiming that Joby was concealing its ties to China. Then, in February of this year, Archer filed a patent infringement suit against a different air taxi rival, Vertical Aerospace, accusing it of copying its “Midnight” design for its own “Valo” aircraft.
These tiffs are taking place less than two years after Archer supposedly settled its dispute with Boeing-backed Wisk Aero over the alleged theft of trade secrets — only to see the case reopened when Wisk asked the court for help enforcing the terms of the settlement.
These heated courtroom battles are unfolding at a precarious time for the air taxi industry, right as it’s trying to position its technology as an important new mode of urban mobility with the ability to whisk passengers across cities without any of the noise or carbon pollution of a traditional helicopter.
Despite these promises, the industry is experiencing a lot of ups and downs. Air taxi stocks have lost most of their value over the last several years as certification deadlines get pushed further and further out. Budgets are dwindling as timelines are getting longer. And investors, already wary about the industry’s ability to win regulatory approval, are growing increasingly nervous about the enormous costs required by these lawsuits.
As companies race to dominate a brand-new, potentially multibillion-dollar aviation industry, these disputes over intellectual property, competition, and talent are triggering an aggressive wave of litigation that could make it even more difficult for the electric air taxi industry to inevitably get off the ground.
How it’s going
Located only an hour from each other across the San Francisco Bay Area, Joby and Archer have become bitter rivals in the race to become the Uber of the sky. In the past year, they’ve become entangled in a series of suits and countersuits that take jabs at their products and progress.
In a suit filed in November 2025, Joby accused Archer of corporate espionage, citing a former Joby employee who left to work for Archer. Joby alleges that the former employee stole technical information and stakeholder communications in order to provide them to his new employer. “Archer brazenly used that stolen information,” Joby claims in its complaint.
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