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A Chinese man who worked as a software engineer at Google in California has been accused by the US Justice Department of stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets from the tech giant while secretly working for rival companies based in China.
Ding Linwei, a 38-year-old Chinese citizen, was hired by Google in 2019 to work on software used in its supercomputing data centers. The indictment, which was unsealed Wednesday in a California federal court, alleged that Ding “began secretly uploading trade secrets stored on Google’s network” between May 2022 and May 2023, “at which time Ding allegedly uploaded more than 500 unique files containing confidential information.”
The technology Ding allegedly stole involved the “building blocks” of Google’s AI infrastructure, prosecutors said. As an employee, Ding had access to Google’s “confidential information relating to the hardware infrastructure, software platform, and artificial intelligence models and applications supported by them,” according to a press release announcing the indictment.
Ding was arrested Wednesday in Newark, California, and charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000 on each count.
“We have stringent safeguards in place to prevent theft of our confidential business information and trade secrets,” Google said in a statement. “After an investigation, we discovered that this employee had stolen numerous documents and we quickly reported the case to law enforcement. We are grateful to the FBI for helping to protect our information and will continue to work closely with them.”
Google is among large tech groups investing tens of billions of dollars to develop generative artificial intelligence products that have the potential to transform technology and other industries. An arms race for AI dominance began last year when Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
The case also comes at a time when tensions have risen over Silicon Valley’s links to China. The Biden administration has moved to ban some US investments in China’s quantum computing, advanced chips and artificial intelligence sectors, in an effort to block China’s military from accessing American technology and capital. It will largely affect private equity and venture capital firms. Before that, some US investors with large operations in the country, such as Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital, spun off their Chinese assets.
In recent years, the U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco has charged three former Apple employees with stealing trade secrets related to self-driving car technology for Chinese companies.
“Today’s charges are the latest example of how far affiliates of companies based in the People’s Republic of China are willing to go to steal American innovation,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
According to the indictment, during his employment at Google, Ding secretly affiliated himself with two China-based technology companies. He said he would help raise capital for one of the companies during a five-month trip to China in late 2022. Potential investors were told that he had been offered the chief technology officer position and that he owned 20% of its actions, prosecutors said.
He also allegedly founded his own artificial intelligence and machine learning company and applied to an incubator program based in China. Ding traveled to Beijing to present his company at an investor conference in November, prosecutors said.
The indictment alleged that he took steps to evade detection by Google’s data loss prevention systems and also allowed another Google employee to use his work access badge to scan a building of Google, making it appear that he was working from Google’s US office when he was in China.