A federal jury on Thursday convicted Linwei Ding, 38, of seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets after an 11-day trial in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California.

Suit alleges OpenAI has a'troubling pattern' of hiring former xAI workers to access secrets about the Grok chatbot Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI has accused rival OpenAI of stealing its trade secrets in a new lawsuit, the latest in Musk's legal assault on his former business partner, Sam Altman. The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in California federal court, alleged that OpenAI was engaged in a "deeply troubling pattern" of hiring away former xAI employees to gain access to trade secrets related to its AI chatbot Grok . The company says OpenAI is pursuing unfair advantages in the race to develop AI technology. "OpenAI is targeting those individuals with knowledge of xAI's key technologies and business plans, including xAI's source code and its operational advantages in launching data centers, then inducing those employees to breach their confidentiality and other obligations to xAI through unlawful means," the lawsuit states. Musk and xAI have launched numerous lawsuits against OpenAI in recent years as part of a longstanding feud between Altman and Musk.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit impressive potential across various tasks but also face significant privacy risks, limiting their practical applications. Current researches on privacy assessment for LVLMs is limited in scope, with gaps in both assessment dimensions and privacy categories. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-P$^2$A, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the privacy preservation capabilities of LVLMs in terms of privacy awareness and leakage. Privacy awareness measures the model's ability to recognize the privacy sensitivity of input data, while privacy leakage assesses the risk of the model unintentionally disclosing privacy information in its output. We design a range of sub-tasks to thoroughly evaluate the model's privacy protection offered by LVLMs. Multi-P$^2$A covers 26 categories of personal privacy, 15 categories of trade secrets, and 18 categories of state secrets, totaling 31,962 samples. Based on Multi-P$^2$A, we evaluate the privacy preservation capabilities of 21 open-source and 2 closed-source LVLMs. Our results reveal that current LVLMs generally pose a high risk of facilitating privacy breaches, with vulnerabilities varying across personal privacy, trade secret, and state secret.

The sharing economy is sprawling across almost every sector and activity around the world. About a decade ago, there were only a handful of platform driven companies operating on the market. Zipcar, BlaBlaCar and Couchsurfing among them. Then Airbnb and Uber revolutionized the transportation and hospitality industries with a presence in virtually every major city. Access over ownership is the paradigm shift from the traditional business model that grants individuals the use of products or services without the necessity of buying them. Digital platforms, data and algorithm-driven companies as well as decentralized blockchain technologies have tremendous potential. But they are also changing the rules of the game. One of such technologies challenging the legal system are AI systems that will also reshape the current legal framework concerning the liability of operators, users and manufacturers. Therefore, this introductory chapter deals with explaining and describing the legal issues of some of these disruptive technologies. The chapter argues for a more forward-thinking and flexible regulatory structure.

A former Google engineer was arrested in California on Wednesday for stealing more than 500 files containing artificial intelligence trade secrets from the company and using the information to benefit rival tech companies in China. In an indictment that was unsealed in a federal California court, prosecutors accused Linwei Ding, a 38-year-old Chinese national who started working at Google in 2019, of uploading trade secrets from his Google-issued laptop to personal cloud storage accounts. The documents that Ding stole involved "building blocks" of Google's AI infrastructure, according to the indictment. Ding was arrested in Newark, California, and charged with four counts of theft of trade secrets. If convicted, he can be sentenced up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to 250,000 for each count.

A Chinese software engineer has been arrested for allegedly stealing artificial intelligence technology from Google while secretly working for two Chinese companies. Linwei Ding, 38, also known as Leon Ding, faces four counts of theft of trade secrets, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said in a statement. Ding, who was arrested on Wednesday in Newark, California, allegedly transferred confidential information from Google's network to his personal account while secretly affiliated with Chinese-based companies in the AI industry. "The justice department will not tolerate the theft of artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies that could put our national security at risk," Garland said. "We will fiercely protect sensitive technologies developed in America from falling into the hands of those who should not have them."

The US has charged a former Apple engineer accused of stealing the company's technology on autonomous systems, including self-driving cars, and then fleeing to China. The department of justice on Tuesday announced charges in that case and several others involving the alleged theft of trade secrets and efforts to steal technology to benefit China, Russia and Iran. Two of the cases involved what US officials called procurement networks created to help Russia's military and intelligence services obtain sensitive technology. "We stand vigilant in enforcing US laws to stop the flow of sensitive technologies to our foreign adversaries," Matt Olsen, the head of the justice department's national security division, told reporters. "We are committed to doing all we can to prevent these advanced tools from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries."

For many years, rumors have been flying around that Apple has been working on a self-driving car, or at least an electric vehicle with some autonomous functionality. Now, a third former employee has been accused of stealing some of that technology for a Chinese self-driving car company. A federal court in the Northern District of California has unsealed charges against Weibao Wang, a former Apple software engineer. Wang started working at the company in 2016 as part of a team that developed hardware and software for autonomous systems -- technology that could conceivably wind up in self-driving cars. According to the indictment, in November 2017, Wang accepted a job with a US subsidiary of a Chinese company that was developing self-driving cars but waited more than four months to tell Apple that he was quitting.

Innovative companies in virtually every industry--from healthcare and investing to transportation and manufacturing--are rapidly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to accomplish sophisticated tasks with increasing accuracy and precision. As these revolutionary technologies evolve and improve, they are becoming an important element in enhancing an ever-growing list of applications, including customer service, logistics, and safety. Wilson Sonsini's artificial intelligence and machine learning team has worked with hundreds of companies in the AI space. Clients rely on us to help them protect and commercialize their AI technologies, in-license AI technologies from start-ups and academic institutions, litigate AI-related IP disputes, and navigate the complex legal and regulatory landscape governing this dynamic field. Because many of our team's attorneys and staff professionals have relevant technical backgrounds, we understand the unique nuances and challenges of this field.

Back in 2018, former Apple employee Xiaolang Zhang was arrested at San Jose International Airport where he was going to board a last-minute flight to China. Zhang was accused of transferring a 25-page document that includes the engineering schematics of a circuit board for the company's self-driving vehicle, along with technical manuals describing Apple's prototype, to his wife's laptop. He was also accused of stealing circuit boards and a Linux server from the company's development labs. Now, Zhang has pleaded guilty to a felony charge of theft of trade secrets in San Jose federal court, according to CNBC. The news organization has obtained a court document (PDF) summarizing the proceedings in which Zhang changed his plea -- he originally pleaded not guilty when he was indicted in 2018.