Google Engineer Charged by US Justice Department for Allegedly Stealing AI Trade Secrets

A software engineer from China, employed by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, has been charged by the US Justice Department for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) from Google’s data centers. Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national residing in Newark, California, was hired by Google in 2019. Ding faces four counts of trade secrets theft, says the Justice Department’s Wednesday statement.

The Department claims that Ding pilfered AI-related trade secrets from Google while surreptitiously working for two AI industry-orientated companies based in China. Google stated that Ding acted independently and said that it acted promptly to refer the case to the authorities upon discovering the issue.

José Castañeda, Google’s spokesperson, stated that the company has stringent measures in place to prevent the theft of its confidential commercial data and trade secrets. As per the Justice Department, Ding is alleged to have relocated sensitive information from Google’s network to his personal email and cloud accounts while clandestinely associating himself with two China-based AI firms.

In recent years, the US Attorney’s office in San Francisco has handled a number of intellectual property theft cases involving China. However, not all cases have resulted in a guilty outcome. It’s important to note that the Department doesn’t assert that Ding shared any specific data that he stole from Google with either of the two companies.

Ding, who was arrested on Wednesday in Newark, could face a prison sentence of up to 10 years and a fine of $250,000 for each count if found guilty. The technology that he allegedly stole relates to the foundational elements of Google’s advanced supercomputing data centers designed for machine learning workloads used to train and host large AI models.