Ex-Google Engineer Charged With AI Tech Theft for Chinese Firms

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Linwei Ding allegedly transferred sensitive information from Google’s network to personal accounts while secretly affiliating himself with two China-based firms working in the AI industry. Photo: VCG

(Bloomberg) — A Chinese software engineer working for Alphabet Inc.’s Google was charged by the U.S. Justice Department with stealing trade secrets for developing artificial intelligence (AI) from the company’s supercomputing data centers.

Linwei Ding, 38, a Chinese national and resident of Newark, California, who was hired by Google in 2019, has been charged with four counts of trade secrets theft, the Justice Department said in a statement Wednesday.