A Google Engineer Allegedly Stole 500 Confidential Files Containing AI Trade Secrets For China, Including Data On TPU Chips & More

The AI arms race between the U.S. and China has escalated to a new level, and there will be some defectors in the mix intending to steal highly secretive files to give the other region an edge. As it happens, one Google engineer, Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly stealing trade secrets revolving around Google’s AI chip software and hardware on March 5. In a statement, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said that Ding had 500 confidential files containing AI trade secrets and was secretly colluding with China-based firms attempting to seek an upper hand in the AI race.

Engineer transferred the top-secret files to his personal Google account before attempting to flee and used other methods to avoid being discovered

As reported by The Verge, the majority of the stolen data contained information about Google’s tensor processing unit (TPU) chips. For those who do not know, Google’s TPU chips power many AI workloads and can train and run AI models like Gemini. The advertising giant also offers chips through partner platforms like Hugging Face. There were also software designs for both the v4 and v6 TPU chips, hardware and software specifications for GPUs used in Google’s data centers, and designs for Google’s machine learning workloads in data centers that were included in the 500 stolen files.

As for how Ding managed to offload heaps of confidential content without being discovered, he likely did it in interventions, as between May 2022 and May 2023, files continued to get transferred to his personal Google Cloud account. Of course, Ding had to avoid any discovery, so he copied data from the Google source files into the Apple Notes app onto the MacBook that was issued to him by the company. From there, he converted the Apple Notes to PDFs to avoid being detected by Google’s ‘data loss prevention systems.’

The Department of Justice stated that less than a month after he started stealing those files, Ding was