A Chinese language nationwide who used to work at Google has been charged with stealing mental property from the tech large linked to its work on synthetic intelligence (AI).
Linwei Ding (aka Leon Ding) was charged with 4 counts of “theft of commerce secrets and techniques,” in accordance with an indictment unsealed yesterday.
It alleged that software program engineer Ding, who was employed by Google in 2019, labored on growing software program deployed in Google’s supercomputing datacenters. In consequence, he had entry to delicate data concerning the AI fashions operating on their servers.
The indictment claimed that between Could 2022 and Could 2023, he started secretly importing IP to a private Google Cloud account – amassing over 500 recordsdata containing confidential data.
Read more on Chinese spying: Chinese Spy Gets 20 Years for Aviation Espionage Plot
In June 2022, Ding allegedly obtained emails from the CEO of an early-stage tech firm primarily based in China suggesting he’d been provided the function of CTO. Then a yr later, in Could 2023, he based his personal tech firm centered on accelerating machine studying workloads, and utilized to a Chinese language startup incubation program.
One doc issued by the corporate allegedly famous: “We’ve got expertise with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational energy platform; we simply want to duplicate and improve it – after which additional develop a computational energy platform suited to China’s nationwide situations.”
In response to the Division of Justice (DoJ), Ding went to nice lengths to maintain his IP theft hidden from Google.
He allegedly copied information from Google supply recordsdata into Apple Notes on his company MacBook, after which transformed them into PDFs and uploaded them to a separate account – to be able to bypass the agency’s information loss prevention (DLP) checks.
Ding can be stated to have allowed a colleague to make use of his badge to scan right into a Google constructing, to make it seem he was working within the US when he was really in China.
“In the present day’s fees are the most recent illustration of the lengths associates of firms primarily based within the Individuals’s Republic of China are keen to go to steal American innovation,” stated FBI director Christopher Wray.
“The theft of progressive expertise and commerce secrets and techniques from American firms can price jobs and have devastating financial and nationwide safety penalties. The FBI will proceed its efforts to vigorously pursue these answerable for stealing US firms’ mental property and most intently guarded secrets and techniques.”
Ding faces a 10-year stretch behind bars and a high quality of as much as $1m if discovered responsible.
Picture credit score: rafapress / Shutterstock.com
