Former Google engineer indicted for stealing AI secrets to aid Chinese companies

SAN FRANCISCO: A dilapidated Google instrument engineer has been indicted in California on costs of stealing swap secrets linked to synthetic intelligence from the Alphabet unit, to wait on two Chinese language companies he became once secretly working for.

Ding Linwei, generally identified as Leon Ding, became once charged on Tuesday (Mar 5) by a federal jury in San Francisco with four counts of theft of swap secrets.

The 38-365 days-broken-down Chinese language national became once arrested on Wednesday morning at his home in Newark, California. A criminal legit for him couldn’t without prolong be identified.

Ding’s indictment became once unveiled a little bit over a 365 days after the Biden administration created an interagency Disruptive Expertise Strike Force to merit conclude evolved technology being received by countries honest like China and Russia, or potentially threaten national security.

“The Justice Division genuine is no longer going to tolerate the theft of our swap secrets and intelligence,” US Attorney Customary Merrick Garland said at a convention in San Francisco.

Based entirely mostly on the indictment, Ding stole detailed facts concerning the hardware infrastructure and instrument platform that lets Google’s supercomputing facts centres command substantial AI objects thru machine learning.

The stolen facts integrated particulars about chips and programs, and instrument that helps energy a supercomputer “in a position to executing at the cutting edge of machine learning and AI technology”, the indictment said.

Google designed among the allegedly stolen chip blueprints to electrify an edge over cloud computing opponents Amazon.com and Microsoft, which form their bear, and decrease its reliance on chips from Nvidia.

Employed by Google in 2019, Ding allegedly started his thefts three years later, while he became once being courted to change into chief technology officer for an early-stage Chinese language tech firm, and by Could well also 2023 had uploaded more than 500 confidential files.

The indictment said Ding primarily based his bear technology firm that month, and circulated a memoir to a chat community that said: “Now we bear abilities with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational energy platform; we genuine must replicate and crimson meat up it.”

Google grew to change into suspicious of Ding in December 2023 and took away his notebook computer on Jan 4, 2024, the day sooner than Ding deliberate to resign.

Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said: “Now we bear strict safeguards to forestall the theft of our confidential commercial facts and swap secrets. After an investigation, we chanced on that this employee stole a form of documents, and we swiftly referred the case to regulation enforcement.”

Ding faces up to 10 years in penal complex and a US$250,000 stunning on each criminal count.