• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 7, 2024

A former Google employee and software engineer secretly working for two Chinese companies has been arrested for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence (AI) technology from the search giant.

Linwei Ding, 38, who goes by the name of Leon Ding, faces four counts of theft of trade secrets, Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, published in a statement.

The court documents describe the technology Ding allegedly stole. It includes the “building blocks of Google’s advanced supercomputing data centers, which are designed to support machine learning workloads used to train and host large AI models.”

The models are AI applications capable of understanding nuanced language and generating intelligent responses to prompts, tasks, or queries. The advanced computer chips with very high processing power are required to facilitate machine learning and run AI applications. The several layers of software, referred to in the indictment as the “software platform,” runs the machine learning workloads.

Ding, who was arrested Wednesday, is a national of the People’s Republic of China and resident of Newark, California, according to the indictment, returned on March 5 and unsealed Wednesday.

He allegedly transferred sensitive Google trade secrets and other confidential information from Google’s network to his personal account while secretly affiliating himself with PRC-based companies in the AI industry.

FBI Director Christopher Wray noted that the charges are the latest illustration of the lengths of workers of companies based in the People’s Republic of China are willing to go to steal American innovation.

The inditement explains that Google hired Ding as a software engineer in 2019, to develop the software in Google’s supercomputing data centers.

Ding had access to Goggle’s confidential information related to the hardware infrastructure, the software platform, and the AI models and applications they supported.

The indictment alleges that on May 21, 2022, Ding began secretly uploading trade secrets that were stored in Google’s network by copying the information into a personal Google Cloud account. He continued periodic uploads until May 2, 2023. He allegedly uploaded more than 500 unique files containing confidential information.