A former Google employee, a software engineer, Linwei Ding was arrested in Newark, California on the charges of stealing artificial intelligence (AI) trade secrets from Google to benefit two Chinese companies.
Ding, a Chinese national, could potentially be in prison for almost 10 years and have to pay a hefty fine of $250,000.
Ding was hired by Google back in 2019, having access to the confidential AI supercomputing data centers of Google, between May 2022 and May 2023, he uploaded hundreds of files containing secret information to his personal Google Cloud account.
The secrets include the architecture and functionality of TPU and GPU chips and systems, software for chip task execution and communication, and software containing thousands of chips in a supercomputer for AI technology and machine learning.
As he continued his job at Google, Ding was offered the position of CTO (Chief Technology Officer) at a tech company in China that focuses on AI, which he later accepted.
He also traveled to China to attend investor meetings to gather capital for the Chinese company he accepted the job offer to join as a CTO. He later founded a separate China-based company and started serving as the CEO of the company, which majorly focused on AI models powered by supercomputing chips.
None of these companies were disclosed before he resigned on December 26, 2023.
The case also presented the details of how Ding tried to trick the detection of data theft by copying data from Google’s source files into his office MacBook’s Apple Notes, converting them into PDFs, and later uploading them to an external account.
After his resignation, Ding booked a one-way ticket to Beijing, China, he was about to depart, but Google found out about it and started investigating with the FBI, leading to the seizure of his electronic devices in January 2024.