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U.S. charges Chinese national with stealing AI trade secrets from Google
Washington — A former Google software engineer who worked on artificial intelligence is accused of stealing more than 500 files containing proprietary information about the tech giant’s supercomputing infrastructure, according to a federal indictment unsealed in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Linwei Ding, a Chinese national living in Newark, California, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with four counts of stealing trade secrets. Federal prosecutors alleged he transferred the secret information from Google to a personal account to benefit tech companies within China.
Court filings revealed the defendant started working for Google in 2019, focusing on software development for machine learning and AI programs. Beginning in May 2022, prosecutors said, he spent a year slowly robbing the tech giant of its proprietary data.
In June 2022, according to the charging documents, Ding received emails from the CEO of a tech company based in Beijing offering him more than $14,000 per month to serve as an executive focused on machine learning and AI training models. The next year, prosecutors said Ding started a company of his own and pitched his tech business to investors at a Beijing venture capital conference.
A marketing document Ding is accused of passing to investors at the meeting touted his “experience with Google’s … platform.”
“We just need to replicate and upgrade it and then further develop a computational power platform suited to China’s national condition,” the document said, according to prosecutors.
Investigators said he continued to take information from Google until December 2023, when company officials first caught wind of his activity. Weeks later, Ding resigned his position and booked a flight to Beijing. He eventually returned to Newark, where he was arrested Wednesday morning after a months-long FBI investigation. It was not immediately clear whether Ding had an attorney.
“We have strict safeguards to prevent the theft of our confidential commercial information and trade secrets. After an investigation, we found that this employee stole numerous documents, and we quickly referred the case to law enforcement,” José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said in a statement. “We are grateful to the FBI for helping protect our information and will continue cooperating with them closely.”
“The Justice Department just will not tolerate the theft of trade secrets,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Monday at an event in San Francisco, echoing sentiments of national security officials who have been sounding the alarm about the theft of American technology by foreign adversaries.
The charges against Ding are the first since the Justice Department said it was prioritizing artificial intelligence technology in its efforts to counter those threats. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said last month that protecting AI is “at the very top” of law enforcement’s priority list, noting it is “the ultimate disruptive technology.”
Jo Ling Kent contributed reporting.
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Remains of decapitated “vampire child” found in Poland, archaeologists say
Workers removing tree branches near a historic cathedral in Chelm, Poland, unearthed something unexpected when they came upon two children’s skeletons in a shallow burial pit where no gravesites are marked, the government’s Culture Ministry said.
Neither skeleton was buried in a coffin and one of the children was buried with the characteristics of an anti-vampire burial, Dr. Stanisława Gołuba, the archaeologist leading the research, said in a Facebook post. The child’s head was separated from its body, the post said, and the skull was facing down into the ground arranged on a stone. This, plus the way the skeletons were oriented, appears to be consistent with ancient burial methods used to prevent a person thought to be a demonic entity from exiting the grave, Gołuba said.
The skeletons appeared to be from the Early Middle Ages.
The children’s skeletons were removed from their graves, documented and waiting for further analysis, the statement said.
It’s the most recent in a series of findings in Poland of remains buried in ways that suggest people at the time believed they were dealing with vampires or other supernatural entities.
In 2022, Polish researchers found the remains of a woman at a gravesite in the village of Pień with a sickle around her neck and a triangular padlock on her foot. According to ancient beliefs, the padlock was supposed to prevent a deceased person thought to be a vampire from returning from the dead. The sickle was thought to cut the neck if the corpse tried to rise from the grave.
Professor Dariusz Polinski of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun said this type of practice became common throughout Poland in the 17th century in response to a reported vampire epidemic. In addition to practices with a sickle, sometimes corpses were burned, smashed with stones or had their heads and legs cut off.
Six so-called “vampire skeletons” were also found at a cemetery in northwest Poland in 2013. Each was buried with either a sickle laid across their necks or stones placed beneath their jaws said Lesley Gregoricka of the University of South Alabama who led the research team.
contributed to this report.
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