Former Google engineer accused of obtaining AI trade secrets to benefit Chinese company
According to The Washington Post, the US Justice Department has announced the arrest of a Chinese citizen who worked as an artificial intelligence (AI) engineer at Google. The department claims the man stole trade secrets regarding the company’s cutting-edge technology and used them to launch his own business in China.
Leon Ding, also known as Linwei Ding, 38, was taken into custody in Newark, California, and charged with four counts of stealing trade secrets by the US Justice Department on Wednesday.
According to The Washington Post, Justice Department officials described the case as a warning that the US government would continue to be on guard against efforts to transfer US sophisticated technology to China illegally in the midst of a technical arms race between Washington and Beijing that is reminiscent of the Cold War.
“The Justice Department will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could put our national security at risk,” said US Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Ding may be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in jail and penalties of up to $1 million if found guilty.
Ding worked on Google’s supercomputing data centers after being recruited by the corporation in 2019 as a software engineer, according to an indictment filed in federal court in San Francisco.
The indictment said that he also contributed to the development of software that supported the functioning of AI and machine learning apps for Google’s clientele.
As reported by The Washington Post, the prosecution said that Ding started transferring private Google data to a personal Google Cloud account in May 2022 and had transferred more than 500 files by May 2023.
The chip architecture and software design requirements for “tensor processing units” and “graphics processing units,” which are the fundamental chips of supercomputing centers, are the subject of the trade secret theft charges.
According to the indictment, Ding formed Shanghai Zhisuan Technology and Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology, two China-based AI companies, while he was employed at Google. Ding did this without telling Google about his actions.
According to The Washington Post, Ding’s computer gadgets and other evidence were taken by the FBI during a search of his home on January 6.
“Let today’s announcement serve as a further warning: Those who would transfer sensitive US technology to China risk finding themselves on the wrong end of a criminal indictment,” said in a statement Assistant Secretary Matthew Axelrod of the Commerce Department’s Office for Export Enforcement.
According to the Justice Department, the Disruptive Technology Strike Force of the Justice and Commerce Departments conducted the Ding investigation. This one-year-old squad was established with the goal of preventing US technology from falling into the hands of “authoritarian regimes and hostile nation-states.”
Remarkably, AI is seen by both the Chinese and US governments as a strategically important new technology that has the ability to significantly increase economic production in non-military areas and provide vital capabilities to intelligence and military forces.
According to The Washington Post, US President Joe Biden signed an AI executive order last year with the intention of maintaining US leadership in AI development over nations like China.
According to Google representative Jose Castaneda, the matter has been forwarded to federal authorities.
“We have stringent security measures in place to deter the loss of our trade secrets and private business data. We immediately submitted the matter to law police after conducting an investigation and discovering that this employee had stolen many papers “, he said.
