United States prosecutors revealed Tuesday that a former Google software engineer stole artificial intelligence technology from the company.
A federal grand jury indicted 38-year-old Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets.
Google hired Ding as a software engineer in 2019. From 2022 to 2023, Ding uploaded more than 1,000 files with confidential information from Google’s network to his personal Google Cloud account, according to the indictment.
“While Ding was employed by Google, he secretly affiliated himself with two People’s Republic of China (PRC)-based technology companies,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office Northern District of California wrote.
By mid-2023, Ding had founded his own technology company in China, focused on AI and machine learning, and was serving as the company’s CEO, according to investigators.
“Ding intended to benefit the PRC government by stealing trade secrets from Google,” prosecutors wrote.
According to federal investigators, China sponsors talent programs that incentivize individuals to engage in research and development outside of the PRC, with the goal of transmitting that knowledge and research back to China in exchange for salaries, research funds, lab space, or other incentives.
Ding is accused of stealing technology from Google related to: The hardware infrastructure and software platform that enables Google’s supercomputing data center to train and serve large AI models;
Trade secrets concerning the architecture and functionality of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit chips and systems, Google’s Graphics Processing Unit systems, the software that enables communication between the chips to execute tasks, and the software that coordinates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of handling advanced AI workloads.
