A Chinese man who worked as a software engineer at Google in California has been charged by the US justice department with stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets from the technology giant while covertly working for rival China-based companies.
Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national, was hired by Google in 2019 to work on the software used in its supercomputing data centres. The indictment, which was unsealed in a California federal court on Wednesday, alleged that Ding “began secretly uploading trade secrets that were stored in Google’s network” between May 2022 and May 2023, “by which time Ding allegedly uploaded more than 500 unique files containing confidential information”.
The technology Ding allegedly stole involved the “building blocks” of Google’s AI infrastructure, the indictment said. As an employee, Ding had been granted access to Google’s “confidential information related to the hardware infrastructure, the software platform and the AI models and applications they supported”, according to a press release announcing the indictment.