Former Google engineer indicted for stealing AI secrets to aid Chinese firms

A former Google software engineer was indicted in California on Tuesday on charges of stealing trade secrets related to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that he took to benefit a pair of companies based in the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, was charged with four counts of trade secret theft for transferring Google's trade secrets and other confidential information to Chinese companies. Ding, 38, began working for Google in 2019 and worked on the tech giant's supercomputing data centers developing software that allowed graphics processing units (GPUs) to function efficiently for machine learning, AI applications or other purposes required by Google or its clients.

According to the indictment, Ding uploaded over 500 unique files containing Google's confidential information, including trade secrets, into a personal Google cloud account between May 2022 and May 2023. Ding exfiltrated these files by copying data from Google source files in Apple Notes on his company-issued laptop, and then converting those notes into PDF files and uploading them from Google's network to evade detection.

Less than a month after his unauthorized upload activity started, Ding was offered a CTO job with a Chinese company known as Rongshu for $14,800 a month plus a bonus and stock. Rongshu's business aimed to develop software to accelerate machine learning on GPU chips and trained AI models.

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Ding also founded a company called Zhisuan that proposed to develop a cluster management system to accelerate machine learning workloads and training large AI models powered by supercomputing chips, according to the indictment. 

The company received funding from a PRC-based startup incubator and touted its ability to replicate and improve upon Google's platform to "develop a computational power platform suited to China's national condition."

Google detected Ding's upload activity while he was in China in December 2023, and on Dec. 8 he told an investigator from the company that he wanted to use the information as evidence of his work at Google and signed an affidavit that he would delete any sensitive Google data in his possession.

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Less than a week later, Ding booked a one-way flight from San Francisco to Beijing, and on Dec. 26 he tendered his resignation effective Jan. 5, 2024, the indictment said. In late December, Google learned that Ding had presented as the CEO of Zhisuan at an investor conference in Beijing the month before and found his unauthorized uploads after searching his network activity history.

Google security personnel retrieved his company laptop and mobile device from his residence on Jan. 4, and the FBI executed search warrants to secure electronic devices and other evidence on Jan. 6 and 13, according to the indictment.

"While Linwei Ding was employed as a software engineer at Google, he was secretly working to enrich himself and two companies based in the People's Republic of China," said U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey in a press release. "By stealing Google's trade secrets about its artificial intelligence supercomputing systems, Ding gave himself and the companies that he affiliated with in the PRC an unfair competitive advantage."

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"The stolen information concerns both Google's hardware infrastructure and its AI software platform. Generally, the information concerns the technology that allows Google's supercomputing data centers to train large AI models through machine learning. While doing this, Ding was secretly tied to two PRC-based technology companies. Both were artificial intelligence companies," Ramsey added in a video statement.

A Google spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement: "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. We are grateful to the FBI for helping protect our information and will continue cooperating with them closely."

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The company said that its investigation found it was one junior employee acting on their own and isn't a pervasive problem at Google. It also noted that employee activity on Google's network was logged, including file transfers to platforms like Google Drive and DropBox.

Reuters contributed to this report.