Google Former employee stole AI secrets for two Chinese companies arrested

Tech giant Google was robbed! You may not believe it, but something like this has happened. A former employee of the company stole secrets related to Google's Artificial Intelligence or AI and passed them on to two Chinese companies. He was secretly working for those companies. A person named Linwei Ding has been arrested from California on charges of theft of trade secrets. The special thing is that Google itself had filed the complaint. The person found guilty has been charged with not just one or two, but four counts of theft. At present, further investigation is being done in the matter.

According to Reuters report, Linwei Ding is also of Chinese origin. He worked as a software engineer in Google. The accused was arrested from California. The allegation is that he stole trade secrets related to artificial intelligence from Google's parent company Alphabet and passed them on to two Chinese companies.

The age of the accused is 38 years. He faces four charges of stealing trade secrets. It is alleged that Ding illegally obtained information related to Google's supercomputing data centers. In those centres, large AI models are trained through machine learning.

Attorney General Merrick Garland, speaking at a conference, said that the theft of our trade secrets and intelligence will not be tolerated.

It is alleged that Ding started showing his colors in the year 2019, three years after getting a job in Google. He started stealing AI secrets. This theft started when the accused was offered the position of Chief Technology Officer by a Chinese tech company. The accused allegedly uploaded more than 500 secret files in May 2023.

According to the report, Ding passed on information to the Chinese company and also started work by forming his own company. By sharing the document in a chat group, Ding had said that he had information about Google's ten thousand card computational power platform. Just need to copy them and upgrade.

Google got wind of the matter and one day before Ding resigned, the company confiscated his laptop. After getting the information, Google decided to register a case. However, Ding could face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.