[ad_1]
Justice Department officials called the case a sign that the U.S. government will remain vigilant against attempts to illicitly transfer advanced American technologies to China amid a Cold War-like technological arms race between Washington and Beijing. .
“The Department of Justice will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could put our national security at risk,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
If convicted, Ding faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.
According to an indictment filed Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco, Ding was hired by Google as a software engineer in 2019 and worked in the company’s supercomputing data centers. He worked on developing software that helped run machine learning and artificial intelligence applications for Google clients, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors said Ding began uploading sensitive Google information to a personal Google Cloud account in May 2022 and had uploaded more than 500 files by May 2023.
The trade secret theft charges involve chip architecture and software design specifications for “tensor processing units” and “graphics processing units,” chips that are the building blocks of supercomputing centers.
While still working at Google, Ding became chief technology officer of a China-based artificial intelligence company, Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology, and founded a second China-based company, Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, without informing Google, according to the company. accusation.
The FBI searched Ding’s residence on January 6 and confiscated his electronic devices and other evidence.
“Let today’s announcement serve as an additional warning: Those who transfer sensitive U.S. technology to China risk finding themselves on the wrong end of a criminal charge,” Office of Export Control Undersecretary Matthew Axelrod said in a statement. of the Department of Commerce.
The Justice Department said the investigation into Ding was conducted by the Justice and Commerce departments’ Disruptive Technology Strike Force, a year-old group aimed at preventing U.S. technologies from being acquired by “authoritarian regimes.” and hostile nation-states.
Both the US and Chinese governments view artificial intelligence as an emerging strategic technology with broad potential to boost economic production in civilian sectors, while providing key capabilities for the military and intelligence agencies. Last year, President Biden issued an executive order on AI aimed at keeping the United States ahead of countries like China in developing AI.
Ding, Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology and Shanghai Zhisuan Technology could not immediately be reached for comment.
Google spokesman José Castañeda said the company had referred the case to federal officials. “We have strict safeguards in place to prevent the theft of our confidential business information and trade secrets. “After an investigation, we discovered that this employee stole numerous documents and we quickly referred the case to authorities,” he said.
Gerrit De Vynck contributed to this report.