A federal grand jury charged a former Google engineer with stealing artificial intelligence-related trade secrets with the intent of providing them to China.
The San Francisco-based jury indicted Linwei Ding, aka Leon Ding, on Wednesday on four charges of theft of trade secrets. The indictment, which was returned on Tuesday and unsealed Wednesday, stated that Ding transferred Google trade secrets and other confidential information from Google’s networks to a personal account. According to the Department of Justice, Ding also had secret affiliations with Chinese companies that created AI products.
“The Justice Department will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could put our national security at risk,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press statement. “In this case, we allege the defendant stole artificial intelligence-related trade secrets from Google while secretly working for two companies based in China. We will fiercely protect sensitive technologies developed in America from falling into the hands of those who should not have them.”
The stolen data included the building blocks of Google’s supercomputing data centers, the DOJ said in its indictment, which are used to support machine learning and host the models that power AI chatbots. Ding, a Chinese national, was hired in 2019 and assisted in developing the data centers, allowing him access to the company’s confidential information. The former engineer secretly uploaded trade secrets in 2022 from Google databases to his personal account. He was also receiving emails at the same time from the CEO of an early-stage AI company based in China, according to the DOJ. These emails include offers to Ding to hire him as Chief Technology Officer. Ding later traveled to China from Oct. 2022 to March 2023, where he participated in investor meetings raising capital for the company. He was represented as the CTO of the company and had 20% of the company’s stock, according to the indictment.
Ding also founded and served as CEO of his own AI company. He used his experience as a Google staffer to hype up his company while concealing the fact that he had stolen trade secrets. Google did not find out about Ding’s connections to other companies until Dec. 2023. The search engine then severed Ding’s access to its internal systems, discovered evidence of his thefts and forwarded the case to the FBI, according to the indictment.
The former engineer was arrested in Newark on Wednesday. He now faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and up to $250,000 for each count of theft.
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“We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets,” Google spokesman José Castañeda said in a statement sent to the Washington Examiner. “After an investigation, we found that this employee stole numerous documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement. We are grateful to the FBI for helping protect our information and will continue cooperating with them closely.”
The U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco has prosecuted multiple cases related to intellectual property theft, including three former Apple engineers accused of stealing secrets from the company’s self-driving car project.
