WTF?! There's been another case of a tech worker stealing trade secrets from their employer and handing them over to China-based rivals. Former Google software engineer Linwei Ding, aka Leon Ding, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for pilfering confidential AI tech while secretly working for Chinese AI firms. He even launched a startup in his home country without Google realizing.
Ding, a national of the People's Republic of China residing in Newark, California, has been charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets. The indictment states that he transferred confidential Google information from the company's network to his personal account while secretly working for two China-based firms within the AI industry.
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said that Ding is alleged to have stolen over 500 files containing AI trade secrets from Google and intended to pass them on to his Chinese employers who were looking to gain an advantage in the AI race.
The technology Ding allegedly stole was mostly related to Google's tensor processing unit (TPU) chips that are optimized for AI computation. Prosecutors claim that he stole chip architecture and software design specifications for TPU versions 4 and 6 on separate occasions.
Ding is also accused of stealing hardware, software, system management, and performance specifications for GPU chips deployed in Google's supercomputing data centers. The indictment adds that the files included software design specs for Google CMS that managed machine learning workloads on TPU and GPU chips in Google's supercomputer data centers.
Ding is said to have transferred the files to a personal Google Cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023. He allegedly did this by copying data from the Google source files into the Apple Notes application on his Google-issued MacBook laptop, then converting them from Apple Notes to PDFs to avoid detection by Google's data loss prevention systems.
Prosecutors said that Ding, without Google's knowledge, launched his own startup in China and had colleagues swipe his badge at Google's offices to conceal the fact he was in another country. As per The Verge, a Chinese machine learning company named Rongshu offered to make him CTO less than a month after he started stealing files from Google.
Ding resigned from Google in December 2023 and booked a one-way ticket to China after the company started questioning him about his suspicious uploads. He faces up to ten years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each of his four counts.
Samsung, Tesla, and Apple are just some of the tech firms that have had employees arrested for stealing trade secrets and selling them to Chinese competitors in the past.