WTF?! There’s been one other case of a tech employee stealing commerce secrets from their employer and handing them over to China-based rivals. Former Google software program engineer Linwei Ding, aka Leon Ding, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for pilfering confidential AI tech while secretly working for Chinese AI companies. He even launched a startup in his dwelling nation with out Google realizing.
Ding, a nationwide of the People’s Republic of China residing in Newark, California, has been charged with 4 counts of theft of commerce secrets. The indictment states that he transferred confidential Google info from the corporate’s community to his private account while secretly working for two China-based companies throughout the AI trade.
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco mentioned that Ding is alleged to have stolen over 500 information containing AI commerce secrets from Google and meant to move them on to his Chinese employers who have been trying to acquire a bonus in the AI race.
The expertise Ding allegedly stole was principally associated to Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU) chips which might be optimized for AI computation. Prosecutors declare that he stole chip structure and software program design specs for TPU variations 4 and 6 on separate events.
Ding can be accused of stealing {hardware}, software program, system administration, and efficiency specs for GPU chips deployed in Google’s supercomputing information facilities. The indictment provides that the information included software program design specs for Google CMS that managed machine studying workloads on TPU and GPU chips in Google’s supercomputer information facilities.
Ding is claimed to have transferred the information to a private Google Cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023. He allegedly did this by copying information from the Google supply information into the Apple Notes utility on his Google-issued MacBook laptop computer, then changing them from Apple Notes to PDFs to keep away from detection by Google’s information loss prevention programs.
Prosecutors mentioned that Ding, with out Google’s data, launched his personal startup in China and had colleagues swipe his badge at Google’s places of work to hide the very fact he was in one other nation. As per The Verge, a Chinese machine studying firm named Rongshu provided to make him CTO lower than a month after he began stealing information from Google.
Ding resigned from Google in December 2023 and booked a one-way ticket to China after the corporate began questioning him about his suspicious uploads. He faces as much as ten years in jail and a $250,000 wonderful for every of his 4 counts.
Samsung, Tesla, and Apple are simply a few of the tech companies which have had staff arrested for stealing commerce secrets and promoting them to Chinese rivals in the previous.
