SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A former Google software program engineer stole synthetic intelligence (AI) know-how from the Silicon Valley tech big, prosecutors mentioned Tuesday.
A federal grand jury returned an indictment Tuesday charging 38-year-old Linwei Ding, also referred to as Leon Ding, with seven counts of financial espionage and 7 counts of theft of commerce secrets and techniques.
Google, which is headquartered in Mountain View, employed Ding as a software program engineer in 2019. Between 2022 and 2023, Ding uploaded greater than 1,000 information containing confidential info from Google’s community to his private Google Cloud account, in accordance with the indictment.
“While Ding was employed by Google, he secretly affiliated himself with two People’s Republic of China (PRC)-based technology companies,” the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace Northern District of California wrote. By mid-2023, Ding had based his personal know-how firm centered on AI and machine studying in China and was performing as the corporate’s CEO, in accordance with investigators.
“Ding intended to benefit the PRC government by stealing trade secrets from Google,” prosecutors wrote.
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China sponsors expertise packages incentivized individuals to engaged in analysis and improvement exterior the PRC to transmit that data and analysis again in change for salaries, analysis funds, lab house, or different incentives, in accordance with federal investigators.
Ding is accused of stealing know-how from Google regarding:
The {hardware} infrastructure and software program platform that permits Google’s supercomputing knowledge middle to coach and serve giant AI fashions.
Commerce secrets and techniques in regards to the structure and performance of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips and techniques and Google’s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) techniques, the software program that permits the chips to speak and execute duties, and the software program that orchestrates hundreds of chips right into a supercomputer able to coaching and executing cutting-edge AI workloads.
Commerce secrets and techniques on Google’s custom-designed SmartNIC, a kind of community interface card used to boost Google’s GPU, excessive efficiency, and cloud networking merchandise.
The case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Casey Boome and Molly Priedeman, in addition to trial attorneys Stephen Marzen and Yifei Zheng of the Nationwide Safety Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Management Part.
