Kumar Siddhartha, Pune
A former Google software engineer has been charged in California with stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets from the Alphabet unit to benefit two Chinese companies, for which he secretly worked.
On Tuesday, a federal jury in San Francisco charged Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, with four counts of theft of trade secrets. The 38-year-old Chinese national was apprehended on Wednesday morning at his home in Newark, California. A lawyer for him could not be identified right away.
Ding’s indictment was made public a little more than a year after the Biden administration established an inter-agency Disruptive Technology Strike Force to help prevent advanced technology from being acquired by countries such as China and Russia, which could endanger national security.
U.S. Attorney General, Merrick Garland, said at a conference in San Francisco that the Justice Department will not allow the theft of the trade secrets and intelligence. The indictment claims that Ding stole comprehensive data regarding the software platform and hardware setup that Google uses in its supercomputing data centres to train massive AI models through machine learning.
According to the indictment, the stolen data contained information about systems, chips, and software that powers supercomputers “capable of operating at the cutting edge of learning algorithms and AI technology.” Some of the allegedly stolen chip blueprints were designed by Google in an effort to lessen its dependency on Nvidia chips and acquire an advantage over rival cloud computing companies Amazon.com and Microsoft, who design their chips.
Ding, who was hired by Google in 2019, is said to have started stealing three years later while he was being courted to become the chief technology officer of a fledgling Chinese tech startup. By May 2023, he had uploaded over 500 private files.
According to the indictment, Ding started his own technology company that same month and distributed a document stating, “We just need to replicate and upgrade Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform,” to a chat group.
The day before Ding was scheduled to resign, on January 4, 2024, Google confiscated his laptop after growing suspicious of him in December 2023.
A Google representative, Jose Castaneda, stated, that they have stringent measures to prevent the theft of their trade secrets and confidential commercial information. Following an investigation, he stated that they discovered how this employee had stolen multiple documents, and they promptly reported this matter to the police.
With each criminal charge, Ding received a sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.