Chinese national Linwei Ding was taken into custody in California. He was charged with transferring numerous documents to the cloud. Based on a federal lawsuit released on Wednesday, a Chinese national who recently left his position as a software developer at Google in California is accused of attempting to transfer AI technologies to a Beijing-based business that paid him in secret.
Linwei Ding, who worked on the team that created and maintained Google’s enormous AI supercomputer data structure, was charged by prosecutors with stealing knowledge of the system’s architecture and operation as well as with stealing programs that were applied to “orchestrate” supercomputers at the forefront of AI and machine learning.
According to the United States Attorney’s office in the Northern District of California, Mr. Ding, formerly known as Leon uploaded 500 files to the cloud between May 2022 and May 2023, many of which contained trade secrets. He did this through a multistep plan that allowed him to avoid being discovered right away.
According to authorities, Mr. Ding was taken into custody early on the morning of Wednesday at his residence in Newark, California, which is close to Google’s massive Mountain View main campus.
According to the accusation, Mr. Ding began receiving $14,800 a month in June 2022 from a China-based technology business, along with a bonus and stock in the company, without disclosing this information to his Google supervisors. Additionally, he is charged with cooperating with a Chinese firm.
Prosecutors said in the charges, which were released in San Francisco federal court, that Mr. Ding openly demanded funds for a new artificial intelligence startup business he founded at a fundraising meeting in Beijing in November. He claimed, “We have experience with Google’s 10,000-card computing system; we only have to duplicate and improve it.”
General Attorney Merrick B. Garland, who announced the charges at a talk at a United States Bar Federation conference in the city of San Francisco on the afternoon of Wednesday, stated that the Department of Justice would not stand for the stealing of computational intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies that could jeopardize our national security.
A federal grand jury indicted Chinese national Linwei Ding (aka Leon Ding) charging him with four counts of theft of trade secrets in connection with an alleged plan to steal sensitive trade secrets and other confidential information from Google’s network to his personal account… https://t.co/QKce9xPoBQ pic.twitter.com/KnwQguw4pD
— Dr. Li-Meng YAN (@DrLiMengYAN1) March 6, 2024
The accusations highlight the fierce competition for supremacy in artificial intelligence. Although the majority of the advancements in generative AI have come from American companies, China has prioritized taking the lead in this rapidly expanding field.
According to insiders in the tech sector, China lags behind the US by at least a year. Nevertheless, a lot of Chinese startups have tried to catch up by utilizing US technology, particularly Meta’s Llama big language model, which is available for free. One of the most sought-after technologies in the world right now is generative artificial intelligence (AI), which powers ChatGPT and the recent surge of conversational chatbots.
These kinds of systems can produce believable text and graphics in a matter of seconds, which can be used for entertainment, disinformation, or productivity enhancement. Still catching up are audio and video capabilities. Google created some of the key innovations that underpin these systems. The company claims that the Gemini family of its most recent artificial intelligence models is among the most potent ones on the market right now.
However, Google has begun to lose its position as the industry leader since ChatGPT’s launch, and its errors have drawn notice. The business stopped users’ capacity to make images of humans after receiving harsh criticism for biases based on race in its image generator.
The main source of conflict in relations between the United States and China for many years has been allegations of stolen intellectual property. 2015 saw the arrest of a Chinese person who was selling some IBM source code to Chinese organizations. 2018 saw the arrest of an ex-Apple worker who tried to get on a plane to Beijing carrying trade secrets related to the company’s autonomous driving technology.
Sinovel Wind Group, a Chinese corporation, was found guilty in the same year of stealing technology for wind turbines from AMSC, a Massachusetts-based business that suffered losses exceeding $800 million.
The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Christopher A. Wray, declared in October that China’s stealing of intellectual property presented a threat to the financial and national security of the United States, calling it the greatest risk of our time.
A Google representative, José Castañeda, stated in an announcement that the company has stringent measures in place to guard against trade secrets and sensitive commercial data stealing. We immediately brought the matter to law authorities after conducting an investigation and discovering that this employee had stolen multiple papers. We appreciate the FBI’s assistance in protecting our data, and we’ll keep working closely with them.
According to the accusation, Mr. Ding allegedly received assistance from another Google employee who stole his identity card at a corporate office to help him hide a trip to China.
Google first claimed that Mr. Ding had acted alone but later stated that did not seem to be the case, referring to him as a junior employee. It insisted that all of its security measures had performed as planned. It needed to be clarified right away if the counsel was representing Mr. Ding.
Little information on the background of Mr. Ding, who started working at Google at the beginning of 2019 and suddenly departed in January after purchasing a side ticket for Beijing, was provided by the government. On a LinkedIn page that matched the information he provided and his work details at Google, Mr. Ding claimed degrees from Stanford, the University of Southern California, and the Dalian University of Technology in China from 2010.
BREAKING: Ex-@Google software engineer charged with stealing AI technology while working with Chinese companies
“Linwei Ding was arrested in Newark, California, on four counts of federal trade secret theft, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison.” https://t.co/IX4gZyVgvS
— Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (@committeeonccp) March 6, 2024
The profile includes a record of his ten-year employment history in software semiconductor and healthcare companies, as well as honors he claimed to have received from Google, such as the Feats of Engineering and Perfy Award.
