United States authorities have intensified scrutiny on corporate espionage in the Artificial Intelligence sector, with former Google software engineer Linwei Ding convicted of economic espionage and theft of confidential Artificial Intelligence technology tied to Google Tensor Processing Units. Investigators found that Ding targeted the entire infrastructure around these accelerators, including chip architecture and external connectivity, in a case that officials framed as part of a broader international Artificial Intelligence arms race.
The Department of Justice determined that Linwei Ding acted for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China, with the primary goal of stealing sensitive intellectual property that Google has spent years and billions of US Dollars developing. Google collaborated with the FBI during the investigation and internal review, and the company found the former employee guilty of stealing as many as two thousand pages of confidential information, which authorities classified as high value trade secrets.
According to the Department of Justice, the trade secrets contained detailed information about the architecture and functionality of Google’s custom Tensor Processing Unit chips and systems and Google’s Graphics Processing Unit systems, the software that allows the chips to communicate and execute tasks, and the software that orchestrates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of training and executing cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence workloads. The stolen materials also covered Google’s custom-designed SmartNIC, described as a high speed network interface card central to communication within Google’s Artificial Intelligence supercomputers and cloud networking products, underscoring the breadth of infrastructure targeted in the scheme.
