A Chinese national living in California was arrested for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence-related technology from Google, the US Department of Justice said on Wednesday.
Linwei Ding, a former Google software engineer, was charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets, US Attorney General Merrick Garland said at an event in San Francisco.
"We allege the defendant stole artificial intelligence-related trade secrets from Google while secretly working for two companies based in China," Garland said.
"We will fiercely protect sensitive technologies developed in America from falling into the hands of those who should not have them."
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said that 38-year-old Ding allegedly stole "over 500 confidential files containing AI trade secrets, while covertly working for China-based companies seeking an edge in the AI technology race."
Ding, who had been working for Google since 2019, was involved in developing the software used in the company's supercomputing data centres, which are designed to support workloads used to train and host large AI models, according to the indictment.
He is alleged to have uploaded trade secrets stored in Google's network to a personal Google Cloud account from May 2022 to May 2023.
