The Justice Department announced Wednesday the arrest of a former Google AI engineer who accused him of stealing information about the company's advanced technologies while planning to start his own company in China.
Leon Ding, or Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national, was arrested in Newark, California and charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets.
Justice Department officials called the case a signal that the U.S. government will remain vigilant against attempts to illegally transfer advanced U.S. technologies to China amid a Cold War-style technological arms race between Washington and Beijing.
“The Department of Justice will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could threaten our national security,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
If convicted, Ding faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million.
According to an indictment filed Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco, Ding was hired by Google in 2019 as a software engineer and worked on the company's supercomputing data centers. He worked to develop software that helped run machine learning and AI applications for Google customers, the indictment says.
Prosecutors said Ding began uploading sensitive Google information to a personal Google Cloud account in May 2022 and uploaded more than 500 files by May 2023.
The trade secret theft numbers involve chip architecture and software design specifications for “tensor processing units” and “graphics processing units,” chips that are the building blocks of supercomputing centers.
While still at Google, Ding became chief technology officer of a China-based AI company, Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology, and founded a second China-based company, Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, without informing Google, the indictment says.
The FBI searched Ding's home on January 6 and seized his electronic devices and other evidence.
“Today's announcement should serve as a further warning: Those who transfer sensitive U.S. technology to China risk ending up on the wrong end of criminal charges,” Assistant Secretary Matthew Axelrod of the Commerce Department's Office for Export Enforcement said in a statement.
The Justice Department said the investigation into Ding was conducted by the Justice and Commerce Department's Disruptive Technology Strike Force, a year-old group aimed at protecting U.S. technologies from acquisition by “authoritarian regimes and hostile nation-states.”
Both the U.S. and Chinese governments view artificial intelligence as a strategic new technology with great potential to increase economic performance in the civilian sector while providing key capabilities for the military and intelligence agencies. President Biden issued an AI executive order last year aimed at keeping the United States ahead of countries like China in AI development.
Ding, Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology and Shanghai Zhisuan Technology could not immediately be reached for comment.
Google spokesman José Castañeda said the company had referred the case to federal officials. “We have strict security measures in place to prevent theft of our confidential business information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we discovered that this employee had stolen numerous documents and immediately referred the case to law enforcement,” he said.
Gerrit De Vynck contributed to this report.