Fifteenth Court of Appeals Decision – September 15, 2026

No. 15-25-00001-CV  CreateAI Holdings, Inc., etc. v. Bot Auto Tx, Inc. (on Appeal from the Business Court Division 11A, Harris County, Texas. Trial Court Cause No. 24-BC-11A-0007. 2025 Tex. Bus. 17). For a summary, see Texas Business Court Decision – May 13, 2025 – Dowd Bennett ; for the text of the opinion, see 24-bc11a-0007-createai-holdings-v-bot-auto-rule-91a-mem-op.pdf).  For the opinion in this case, see SearchMedia.aspx

[Brister, Author, with Field and Farris, Justices]

Texas Uniform Trade Secrets Act.

Background. CreateAI and Bot Auto are rival autonomous trucking startups. CreateAI, founded in 2015, achieved a driverless hub-to-hub trip in late 2021, but it fired co-founder and CEO Dr. Xiaodi Hou in 2022. Dr. Hou founded Bot, which achieved its own fully-autonomous (but not driverless) hub-to-hub trip within about 15 months. Meanwhile, CreateAI had left the autonomous truck business to focus on AI-powered digital entertainment. Before it pivoted, CreateAI sued Bot under the Texas Uniform Trade Secrets Act, alleging misappropriation of (1) its proprietary sensor suite, (2) aspects of its decision-making/data-annotation technology, and (3) proprietary braking and steering safety systems and parameters. The trial court initially entered an agreed TRO preserving the status quo, but after a two-day evidentiary hearing in November 2024, the court denied CreateAI’s request for a temporary injunction and dissolved the TRO. CreateAI brought this accelerated interlocutory appeal.

Issues Presented:

1. Whether the trial court abused its discretion in finding CreateAI failed to show a probable right to recover on its misappropriation claims regarding the sensor array, the decision-making/data-annotation technology, and the safety technology.
2. Whether the trial court abused its discretion in finding CreateAI failed to show probable, imminent, irreparable injury absent injunctive relief.

Discussion. Reviewing the decision for abuse of discretion, the court affirms on all points, holding “some evidence” supported the denial of injunctive relief.

1.

On the sensor array: CreateAI’s external sensor configuration was not a protectable trade secret because it had publicized the exact sensor types and locations in a 2022 investor presentation, and the sensors are visible on the trucks themselves. In any event, Bot’s sensors differ materially in model, mounting height, and function from CreateAI’s.

On the decision-making technology: CreateAI’s only concrete evidence was Bot’s use of similar “green case/red case” color-coded terminology, which the court considered of minor importance compared to CreateAI’s far more granular semantic regime. More fundamentally, CreateAI relied on convolutional neural networks requiring extensive manual data annotation, while Bot uses transformer neural networks that need comparatively little manual annotation – this renders CreateAI’s annotation conventions largely irrelevant to Bot’s technology.

On the safety technology: Dual-CAN-bus braking redundancy is a general engineering principle, not a trade secret, and was, in any event, disclosed in CreateAI’s 2022 investor materials. As for steering, the companies’ technical specifications (torque, position error tolerance, response latency) differ significantly, undercutting any claim Bot copied CreateAI’s parameters.

2. As to irreparable injury: CreateAI’s pivot away from its  autonomous truck program (it maintains about 10 staff on the project) undercut its claim of ongoing injury from Bot’s conduct. To the extent CreateAI still has  trucking-related interests, they were limited to licensing, for which lost royalties are a compensable, calculable damages remedy rather than a basis for injunctive relief.