Former Google Engineer Arrested for Alleged Theft of AI Trade Secrets

Former Google engineer Linwei Ding has been arrested for allegedly stealing AI trade secrets from the company and secretly working with two China-based companies. The US Department of Justice alleges that Ding, a Chinese national, uploaded hundreds of files containing detailed information about Google's GPU and TPU chips and systems into a personal Google Cloud account. He was offered a position at a Chinese technology company and founded a separate startup while still employed at Google, without disclosing these affiliations. Authorities found over 500 unique files of confidential information that Ding allegedly stole from Google, and he now faces four counts of federal trade secret theft, each carrying a potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison.