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Superseding Indictment Charges Chinese National In Relation To Alleged Plan To Steal Proprietary AI Technology

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Superseding Indictment Charges Chinese National in Relation to Alleged Plan to Steal Proprietary AI Technology

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Note: View the superseding indictment here.

A federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment today charging Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, 38, with seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets in connection with an alleged strategy to take from Google LLC (Google) proprietary details related to AI innovation.

Ding was initially arraigned in March 2024 on four counts of theft of trade secrets. The superseding indictment returned today explains 7 classifications of trade tricks taken by Ding and charges Ding with 7 counts of economic espionage and 7 counts of theft of trade tricks.

According to the superseding indictment, Google employed Ding as a software application engineer in 2019. Between approximately May 2022 and May 2023, Ding published more than 1,000 distinct files containing Google private details from Google's network to his individual Google Cloud account, including the trade tricks declared in the superseding indictment.

While Ding was employed by Google, he covertly connected himself with two People's Republic of China (PRC)- based technology business. Around June 2022, Ding remained in conversations to be the Chief Technology Officer for an early-stage innovation company based in the PRC. By May 2023, Ding had founded his own innovation company concentrated on AI and artificial intelligence in the PRC and was serving as the company's CEO.

The superseding indictment alleges that Ding planned to benefit the PRC government by taking trade tricks from Google. Ding apparently took innovation relating to the hardware infrastructure and software application platform that allows Google's supercomputing data center to train and serve large AI designs. The trade secrets contain detailed details about the architecture and performance of Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips and systems and Google's Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) systems, the software application that enables the chips to communicate and carry out tasks, and the software that manages countless chips into a supercomputer capable of training and carrying out innovative AI workloads. The trade tricks also pertain to Google's custom-made SmartNIC, a kind of network user interface card utilized to boost Google's GPU, high efficiency, and cloud networking items.

As alleged, Ding flowed a PowerPoint discussion to staff members of his innovation company mentioning PRC national policies encouraging the development of the domestic AI market. He also developed a PowerPoint presentation containing an application to a PRC talent program based in Shanghai. The superseding indictment explains how PRC-sponsored skill programs incentivize individuals participated in research and development outside the PRC to send that understanding and research study to the PRC in exchange for salaries, research study funds, setiathome.berkeley.edu lab space, or other rewards. Ding's application for the skill program mentioned that his company's product "will help China to have computing power facilities capabilities that are on par with the worldwide level."

If convicted, Ding faces a maximum charge of ten years in jail and approximately a $250,000 fine for each trade-secret count and 15 years in jail and $5,000,000 fine for each economic-espionage count. A federal district court judge will identify any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

The FBI is examining the case.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Casey Boome and Molly K. Priedeman for the Northern District of California and Trial Attorneys Stephen Marzen and Yifei Zheng of the National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control Section are prosecuting the case.

Today's action was collaborated through the Justice and Commerce Departments' Disruptive Technology Strike Force. The Disruptive Technology Strike Force is an interagency police strike force co-led by the Departments of Justice and Commerce created to target illegal stars, secure supply chains, and prevent vital technology from being obtained by authoritarian routines and hostile nation-states.

A superseding indictment is merely a claims. All accuseds are presumed innocent until tested guilty beyond an affordable doubt in a court of law.