Ex-Google Engineer Arrested, Charged With Stealing AI Trade Secrets for China

A former Google software engineer has been indicted on charges of stealing artificial intelligence-related trade secrets while working for Chinese competitors seeking to gain an edge in the AI race.

Linwei Ding, a Chinese national who also goes by Leon, was charged by a federal grand jury in San Francisco with four counts of trade secret theft, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison. He was arrested on March 6 morning in California’s Newark city, where he lives.

The 38-year-old allegedly stole over 500 files containing confidential information between May 2022 and May 2023, including detailed information about the hardware infrastructure and software platforms allowing Google’s supercomputing data centers to train large AI models through machine learning, according to the indictment.

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