Cyber: Ex-google Engineer Convicted For Stealing 2,000 AI Trade Secrets...
A former Google engineer accused of stealing thousands of the company's confidential documents to build a startup in China has been convicted in the U.S., the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Thursday.
Linwei Ding (aka Leon Ding), 38, was convicted by a federal jury on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for taking over 2,000 documents containing the tech giant's trade secrets related to artificial intelligence (AI) technology for the benefit of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
"Silicon Valley is at the forefront of artificial intelligence innovation, pioneering transformative work that drives economic growth and strengthens our national security," said U.S. Attorney Craig H. Missakian. "We will vigorously protect American intellectual capital from foreign interests that seek to gain an unfair competitive advantage while putting our national security at risk."
Ding was indicted in March 2024 for transferring sensitive proprietary information from Google's network to his personal Google Cloud account. The stolen documents included details about the company's supercomputing data center infrastructure used for running AI models, the Cluster Management System (CMS) software for managing the data centers, and the AI models and applications they supported.
The theft took place between May 2022 and April 2023. Ding, who joined Google in 2019, is said to have affiliated himself with two tech companies based in China, including a startup named Shanghai Zhisuan Technologies Co., which he founded in 2023, while he was employed by the firm. Ding downloaded the documents to his computer in December 2023, less than two weeks before resigning from Google.
"Around June 2022, Ding was in discussions to be the Chief Technology Officer for an early-stage technology company based in the PRC; by early 2023, Ding was in the process of founding his own technology company in the PRC focused on AI and machine learning and was acting as the company's CEO," the DoJ said.
The 2024 incident also alleged that the defendant took a number of deceitful steps to cover up the theft of trade secrets, including copying the data from Google source files into the Apple Notes application on his company-provided MacBook and then converting the notes to PDF files before uploading them to his Google account.
Furthermore, prosecutors accused Ding of asking another Google employee to use his company-issued access badge to scan into the entran
Source: The Hacker News
