A Google employee was charged Tuesday with stealing artificial intelligence trade secrets from the tech giant while secretly working with two Chinese-based companies in the AI industry.
Linwei Ding, who also goes by Leon Ding, is charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison for each count.
Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national who lives in California, is accused of copying more than 500 files with confidential information from Google into his own personal account over the course of one year, beginning in 2022. The files included technology involved in the building blocks of Google’s advanced supercomputing data centers, prosecutors say.