Chinese national accused of stealing AI secrets from Google facing new charges
The Department of Justice announced Tuesday that a grand jury indicted Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets. Ding, a 38-year-old software engineer who had lived in Newark, was previously indicted on four counts of theft of trade secrets last March after he allegedly stole 500 confidential files from Google.
He was hired by the company in 2019, prosecutors said.
According to the superseding indictment, Ding allegedly uploaded more than 1,000 files containing confidential company information into his personal Google Cloud account from May 2022 through May 2023.
Prosecutors said the trade secrets pertained to the company's hardware infrastructure and software platform that allows Google's supercomputing data center to train and serve large AI models.
"The trade secrets contain detailed information about the architecture and functionality of TPU chips and systems and GPU systems, the software that allowed the chips to communicate and execute tasks, and the software that orchestrated thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of training and executing cutting-edge AI workloads. The trade secrets also pertain to Google's custom designed SmartNIC and related software," the indictment said.
During that time, Ding was offered the position of chief technology officer of a Chinese-based tech company. Between Oct. 2022 and Mar. 2023, Ding was in China seeking to raise capital for the company, the indictment said.
In May 2023, prosecutors said Ding had founded a second tech company in China focused on AI and machine learning and was acting as its CEO.
The indictment also alleges that he uploaded more files from Google in Dec. 2023, which the company detected. Prosecutors said Ding did not tell Google that he had previously uploaded 1,000 files or his affiliations with the Chinese-based companies.
Google uncovered the uploads after finding out that Ding had presented himself as CEO of one of the companies during an investor conference in Beijing, the indictment said.
The FBI executed a search warrant at his home in Jan. 2024 and Ding was arrested two months later.
According to prosecutors, Ding faces a maximum of 10 years in prison and up to a $250,000 fine for each trade secret count and 15 years in prison and a $5 million fine for each count of economic espionage.
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