A Chinese national who recently quit his job as a software engineer for Google in California has been charged with trying to transfer artificial intelligence technology to a Beijing-based company that paid him in secret, according to a federal indictment that was not was sealed on Wednesday.
Prosecutors accused Linwei Ding, who was part of the team that designed and maintained Google’s vast AI supercomputer data system, of stealing information about the system’s “architecture and functionality,” and of stealing software used to “orchestrate” the supercomputers “at the cutting edge of machine learning and AI technology.”
From May 2022 to May 2023, Mr. Ding, also known as Leon, uploaded 500 files, many containing trade secrets, from his Google-issued laptop to the cloud by using of a multistep scheme that allowed him to “evade immediate detection,” according to the US attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.
Mr. Ding was arrested Wednesday morning at his home in Newark, Calif., not far from Google’s sprawling main campus in Mountain View, officials said.
Beginning in June 2022, Mr. Ding of $14,800 a month — including a bonus and company stock — from a China-based technology company, without telling his supervisors at Google, according to the indictment. He was also accused of working for another company in China.
Mr. Ding publicly sought funding for a new AI start-up company he incorporated at an investor conference in Beijing in November, boasting that “we have experience with Google’s 10,000-card computational power platform; we just need to copy and upgrade it,” prosecutors said in the indictment, which was unsealed in San Francisco federal court.
“The Justice Department will not allow the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technology that could put our national security at risk,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who announced the indictment in an appearance before an American Bar Association conference in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon.
The charges underscore the high-stakes contest for primacy in artificial intelligence. While American companies have developed most of the advances in generative AI, China has done so a strategic priority to lead the growing field.
Technology industry insiders estimate that China is at least a year behind the United States, but many Chinese start-ups have used American technology to try to keep up, especially the big language open- source of Meta, called Llama. Generative AI, which is behind ChatGPT and the wave of conversational chatbots, is quickly becoming one of the most impressive technologies in the world.
In seconds, these types of tools can generate convincing text and images that can be used to boost productivity, create misinformation or provide entertainment. Audio and the video capabilities are not far behind. Google developed some of the key breakthroughs that make these systems work. The company says its latest group of AI models, named Gemini, are among the most powerful available today.
But since ChatGPT debuted, Google has lost its status as a market leader and its stumbles have drawn attention. The company has been widely criticized for racial bias in its image generator, leading it to pause users’ ability to create images of people.
Accusations of intellectual property theft have been a sticking point in US-China relations for years. A Chinese national was arrested in 2015 for sells some of IBM’s source code to parties in China. In 2018, a former Apple employee was caught trying to board a flight to Beijing using the company’s autonomous-driving trade secrets.
In the same year, the Chinese firm Sinovel Wind Group was convicted of stealing wind turbine technology from a Massachusetts-based company, AMSC, which had more than $800 million in losses.
In October, Christopher A. Wray, the director of the FBI, said that the theft of intellectual property from China was a risk to the US economy and national security, describing it as “defining the threat of the next generation this.”
José Castañeda, a Google spokesman, said in a statement: “We have strict safeguards in place to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we found that this employee had stolen many documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement. We are grateful to the FBI for helping to protect our information and will continue to work closely with them.”
The indictment suggested that Mr. Ding, saying that another Google employee swiped Mr.’s identification card. Ding to a company office to help him cover up a trip to China.
Google, referring to Mr. Ding as a “junior employee,” initially said he acted alone but later said that was not the case. It maintains that its security systems work as intended.
It was not immediately clear if Mr. Ding.
The government offered few details about Mr. Ding, who started working for Google in early 2019 and quit suddenly in January — after booking a one-way ticket to Beijing.
Mr. listed Ding has a degree from the Dalian Institute of Technology in China in 2010, along with degrees from the University of Southern California and Stanford, on a LinkedIn page that matches his name and job details at Google.
The page lists stints at software semiconductor and healthcare companies over the past decade, along with awards he says he earned at Google, including the “Perfy Award and Feats of Engineering.”
Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
