The U.S. Department of Justice has charged Lin Wei Ding, a Chinese national and former Google engineer, with four counts of stealing trade secrets, according to Bloomberg. Lin Wei Ding, 38, who was arrested in Newark, faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count if convicted.
While working at Google, he was hired by the American company in 2019, Lin Wei Ding had access to confidential hardware and software information, as well as artificial intelligence models and applications. Some of this information was allegedly uploaded to his personal account.
“The defendant is accused of stealing AI-related trade secrets from Google while working undercover for two companies in China,” Merrick Garland, U.S. Attorney General, said in a statement, adding : “We will vigorously protect sensitive technologies developed in the United States from falling into the wrong hands.”
Transfer of sensitive information
In response, Google insisted that Lin Wei Ding had acted alone, and said it acted quickly after discovering the problem and referring the matter to authorities.
“Google has strict safeguards in place to prevent the theft of confidential business information and trade secrets,” said Jose Castaneda, Google spokesperson, adding: “We are grateful to the FBI for their helps in protecting our information and we will continue to work closely with him.”
According to the DOJ, Lin Wei Ding transferred sensitive information from Google’s network to his personal email and cloud accounts. He was also secretly a collaborator of two Chinese companies specializing in AI. She hadn’t mentioned this to Google.
American movement
“(The technology stolen by Lin Wei Ding) involves Google supercomputer data centers, designed to support machine learning workloads used to train and host large-scale AI models,” explained the US Department of Justice.
It is the first such action since US authorities announced last month that they were focusing on the transfer of AI technology. In recent years, prosecutors have also brought several indictments for intellectual property theft involving China. One example is the indictment of three former Apple engineers, accused of stealing trade secrets from Apple’s self-driving project and taking jobs with Chinese companies.
Source: “ZDNet Korea”