Washington — A former Google software engineer who worked on artificial intelligence is accused of stealing more than 500 files containing proprietary information from the tech giant’s supercomputing infrastructure, according to a federal indictment unsealed Wednesday in San Francisco.
Linwei Ding, a Chinese national living in Newark, California, was arrested Wednesday and charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets. Federal prosecutors alleged he transferred secret Google information to a personal account for the benefit of Chinese technology companies.
Court filings revealed that the defendant began working for Google in 2019, focusing on software development for machine learning and AI programs. Starting in May 2022, prosecutors said, he spent a year slowly stripping the tech giant of its proprietary data.
In June 2022, according to charging documents, Ding received emails from the CEO of a Beijing-based technology company offering him more than $14,000 per month to fill the executive position focused on machine learning and AI training models. The following year, prosecutors said Ding started his own company and pitched his technology business to investors at a venture capital conference in Beijing.
A marketing document that Ding is accused of passing to investors during the meeting touted his “experience with Google’s…platform.”
“We just need to reproduce and upgrade it, and then further develop a computing power platform suitable for China’s national situation,” the document said, according to prosecutors.
Investigators said he continued to collect information from Google until December 2023, when company officials first learned of his activity. A few weeks later, Ding resigned from his position and booked a flight to Beijing. He eventually returned to Newark, where he was arrested Wednesday morning after a months-long FBI investigation. It was not immediately clear whether Ding had an attorney.
“We have strict safeguards in place to prevent the theft of our confidential business information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we discovered that this employee had stolen numerous documents and we quickly brought the matter to law enforcement. order,” said José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson. said in a statement. “We are grateful to the FBI for helping to protect our information and will continue to cooperate closely with them.”
“The Department of Justice simply will not tolerate the theft of trade secrets,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday at an event in San Francisco, echoing the sentiments of national security officials who have been ringing the bell. alarm over the theft of American technology by foreign adversaries.
The charges against Ding are the first since the Justice Department said it was prioritizing artificial intelligence technology in its efforts to counter such threats. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said last month that protecting AI was “at the very top” of law enforcement’s priority list, emphasizing that it was “the technology of ultimate break.”
Jo Ling Kent contributed reporting.
