On March 6, the Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed an indictment that signals DOJ's increased
focus on enforcement actions related to artificial intelligence
(AI) and other advanced U.S. technologies. DOJ's action was
coordinated by the Disruptive Technology Strike Force, an
interagency law enforcement strike force co-led by DOJ and the
Department of Commerce with an aim of, among others,
"prevent[ing] U.S. critical technology from being acquired by
authoritarian regimes and hostile nation-states."
According to the DOJ press release and the indictment, a federal
grand jury in the Northern District of California indicted Linwei
Ding, aka Leon Ding, a Chinese national and resident of California,
charging him with four counts of theft of AI-related trade secrets
from Google LLC. Since 2019, Google had employed Ding as a software
engineer to develop software deployed in its supercomputing data
centers. The indictment alleges that Ding was granted access to
Google's