Google engineer indicted over allegedly stealing AI industry secrets and techniques for China

A federal grand jury has indicted a Google engineer, Linwei Ding, aka Leon Ding, for allegedly stealing industry secrets and techniques round Google’s AI chip tool and {hardware} on March fifth, prior to he used to be arrested Wednesday morning in Newark, California. Deputy Lawyer Normal Lisa Monaco stated in a commentary that Ding “stole from Google over 500 confidential recordsdata containing AI industry secrets and techniques whilst covertly operating for China-based firms in search of an edge within the AI generation race.”  A lot of the stolen information allegedly revolves round Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU) chips. Google’s TPU chips energy lots of its AI workloads and, together with Nvidia GPUs, can educate and run AI fashions like Gemini. The corporate has additionally introduced get right of entry to to the chips thru spouse platforms like Hugging Face.  Symbol: Justice DepartmentSoftware designs for each the v4 and v6 TPU chips, {hardware} and tool specs for GPUs utilized in Google’s information middle, and designs for Google’s device studying workloads in information facilities are a few of the allegedly stolen recordsdata. The federal government accuses Ding of shifting the ones recordsdata to a private Google Cloud account between Might 2022 and Might 2023. He allegedly did so “by way of copying information from the Google supply recordsdata into the Apple Notes utility on his Google-issued MacBook pc,” after which changing them from Apple Notes to PDFs to keep away from detection by way of Google’s “information loss prevention techniques.” The federal government says that lower than a month after he started stealing recordsdata, a Chinese language device studying corporate named Rongshu introduced to make him CTO, he flew to China for 5 months to lift budget for the corporate, and he therefore based and led a device studying startup named Zhisuan, all whilst nonetheless operating for Google. He resigned from Google in December 2023 — and reportedly booked a one-way price ticket to Beijing scheduled to go away two days previous his finish date — after the corporate started asking him about his uploads.The DOJ additionally claims that during December 2023, he allegedly faked being provide at Google’s place of business in the USA by way of having some other worker scan his badge on the door whilst he used to be in reality in China. Ding has been charged with 4 counts of robbery of industry secrets and techniques, so he’s dealing with as much as ten years in jail and a $250,000 fantastic on every depend if convicted.

Author: OpenAI