Ex-Google engineer charged for stealing AI secrets to aid Chinese firm

Washington, DC: The US Justice Department has announced the arrest of a Chinese national, who was a former Google Artificial Intelligence (AI) engineer, alleging that he stole information about the company's advanced technologies to set up his own company in China, reported The Washington Post.
The US Justice Department announced the arrest of 38-year-old Leon Ding, or Linwei Ding, on Wednesday and detained him in Newark, California, charging him with four counts of trade secret theft.
The Justice Department officials called the case a signal that the US government will remain vigilant against attempts to illicitly transfer advanced US technologies to China amid a cold war-like technological arms race between Washington and Beijing, according to The Washington Post.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland said, "The Justice Department will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could put our national security at risk."
If convicted, Ding will face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and up to USD 1 million in fines.
According to an indictment filed in federal court in San Francisco, Ding was hired by Google as a software engineer in 2019 and worked on the company's supercomputing data centres.
He also worked on developing software that helped the operation of machine learning and AI applications for Google's clients, the indictment said.
The prosecutors said that Ding began uploading confidential Google information to a personal Google Cloud account in May 2022 and had uploaded over 500 files by May 2023, as reported by The Washington Post.
The trade secret theft counts involve chip architecture and software design specifications for "tensor processing units" and "graphics processing units," chips that are the building blocks of supercomputing centres.
While working at Google, Ding also became the Chief Technology Officer of a China-based AI company, Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology, and founded a second China-based company, Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, without informing Google, the indictment said.
The FBI searched Ding's residence on January 6 and seized his electronic devices and other evidence, The Washington Post reported.
"Let today's announcement serve as a further warning: Those who would transfer sensitive US technology to China risk finding themselves on the wrong end of a criminal indictment," Assistant Secretary Matthew Axelrod of the Commerce Department's Office for Export Enforcement said in a statement.
The Justice Department said the investigation into Ding was carried out by the Justice and Commerce Departments' Disruptive Technology Strike Force, a year-old group aimed at securing US technologies from being acquired by "authoritarian regimes and hostile nation-states."
Notably, both the US and Chinese governments view AI as a strategic emerging technology with broad potential to boost economic output in civilian sectors, while providing key capabilities for militaries and intelligence agencies.
Last year, US President Joe Biden issued an AI executive order, aimed at keeping the US ahead of countries like China in AI development, reported The Washington Post.
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the company had referred the case to federal officials.
"We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we found that this employee stole numerous documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement," he said.