dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Engineer accused of stealing Google’s AI secrets for Chinese startup

Attorney General Merrick Garland warned that prosecutors will not allow China to overtake a U.S. lead in the cutting-edge technology through theft of American firms’ intellectual property.

03/06/2024 06:30 PM EST

A former Google engineer was charged with stealing “cutting edge” technology from the company’s artificial intelligence program as he created a competing business in China.

Linwei Ding, 38, was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury on four counts of theft of trade secrets. The Chinese citizen was arrested Wednesday morning in Newark, California, across the bay from Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters, a Justice Department statement said.

In an unusual move, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the charges during an appearance in San Francisco Wednesday at the American Bar Association’s annual white-collar crime conference.

Garland portrayed the case as an illustration of the commitment of U.S. law enforcement to disrupt efforts by China to build its AI industry by stealing technology American companies have developed at great expense.

“The United States has an important lead in this technology,” Garland said. “The Justice Department’s first job is to project that lead and to protect our intellectual property … The Justice Department just will not tolerate theft of our trade secrets in the area of artificial intelligence.”

According to the indictment, Ding uploaded more than 500 confidential Google files to his personal Google Cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023. During the same period, Ding was trying to get a start in China, according to the indictment. That included talking to Beijing-based Rongshu about a chief technology officer position and creating his own Shanghai-based company called Zhisuan.

Ding never told Google about his connection with either firm and took steps to conceal some of his travels to China, including by asking a colleague to swipe his access badge at Google’s offices when Ding was abroad, the indictment says.

Ding began working for Google in 2019, assigned to projects related to the software platforms used in the company’s supercomputer data centers, according to the charges.

Google discovered last December that Ding had presented the previous month at an investor conference in China organized by startup accelerator MiraclePlus, touting the new company he’d founded, the indictment claims. Security personnel at the tech behemoth then suspended his access, remotely locked his laptop and detected his “unauthorized uploads” of data dating back to 2022, according to the charges.

Ding appeared in federal court in San Francisco Wednesday morning and entered a not guilty plea to the charges, court records show. U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ordered Ding released on a $150,000 bond, according to the court docket. An attorney who represented Ding at the hearing, Grant Fondo, declined to comment.

A Google spokesperson said the company contacted the FBI promptly upon learning about the alleged breach.

“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,” firm spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement. “We are grateful to the FBI for helping protect our information and will continue cooperating with them closely.”

In 2022, President Joe Biden’s appointees at the Justice Department shut down a Trump-era effort known as the “China Initiative,” which focused on prosecuting Chinese efforts to use contacts in business and higher education to unlawfully acquire U.S. technology secrets. The program had a spotty track record in court and drew accusations from civil rights groups that it unfairly put Chinese-Americans and others of Chinese origin under suspicion.

However, DOJ officials have continued to paint China as the leading threat to U.S. technology firms and have continued to pursue investigations and prosecutions like the one revealed Wednesday.

Garland announced the new charges during an on-stage conversation at the ABA event with Kenneth Polite, who served as the head of Justice’s Criminal Division under Garland from 2021 through last July.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/06/engineer-google-ai-chinese-startup-00145502