A federal grand jury has indicted former Google LLC engineer Linwei Ding, aka Leon Ding, for allegedly stealing trade secrets from the search giant. 

The Justice Department unsealed the indictment on Wednesday. Ding, who was arrested earlier that day, is charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets. Those secrets relate to several key components of Google’s artificial intelligence infrastructure including its internally-developed TPU chips.

“In this case, we allege the defendant stole artificial intelligence-related trade secrets from Google while secretly working for two companies based in China,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. “We will fiercely protect sensitive technologies developed in America from falling into the hands of those who should not have them.”

Google hired Ding in 2019 to develop software for its data centers. In that capacity, he had access to technical information about Google’s AI hardware and the software that powers it. Ding was also given permission to view data about the search giant’s AI models as well as the applications they support.

The indictment charges that Ding uploaded more than 500 files containing confidential Google information to a personal cloud storage account. According to the Justice Department, some of those files described the architecture of the search giant’s fourth- and sixth-generation TPU chips, as well as those chips’ software. Other records contained data about the graphics cards in the company’s AI infrastructure.

Ding was also charged with stealing information about Google’s cluster management system. That’s a software platform responsible for managing the AI workloads deployed on the search giant’s TPUs and GPUs.

He allegedly began uploading the files to a personal Google Cloud account on May 21, 2022. In June of that year, he received emails from a Chinese startup indicating he had been offered the role of Chief Technology Officer. The startup’s goal was to develop software for training AI models, the Justice Department detailed.

Later in 2022, Ding traveled to China to start his own AI company. A document produced by the startup he launched reportedly stated that “we have experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it.” 

Ding allegedly continued uploading trade secrets to his Google Cloud account until May 2, 2023. He took steps to try and evade detection by the search giant’s cybersecurity systems. According to the indictment, Ding copied data from internal Google files to a note-taking app and then turned the notes into PDFs before uploading them to his personal account.

Google said in a statement to The Verge that “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. We are grateful to the FBI for helping protect our information and will continue cooperating with them closely.”

Photo: Google