The U.S. has imposed sanctions on a Chinese company over allegations of stealing Google's AI technology — Bloomberg

The U.S. has imposed sanctions on the Chinese venture capital firm MiraclePlus, founded by Lu Qi, the former head of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division. The move was prompted by the company’s alleged ties to a startup accused of stealing Google’s artificial intelligence technology.

 

On Monday, the U.S. State Department imposed sanctions on Shanghai Zhisuan Technology Co., founded by Ding Linwei. He is a former Google software engineer who was found guilty this year of stealing the company’s trade secrets in the field of artificial intelligence.

The sanctions also target MiraclePlus—a company Lu founded as part of the Chinese division of the American startup accelerator Y Combinator—and three affiliated companies. The basis for the sanctions was the funding provided during Zhisuan’s early stages of operation. Specifically, the sanctions include the freezing of assets in the U.S. and restrictions on access to banking services.

Lu, a former Microsoft executive, joined China’s Baidu Inc. in 2017, where he headed the artificial intelligence division. However, he left the company just one year later, citing personal reasons for his decision. In 2018, Lu joined the U.S.-based Y Combinator at the invitation of the company’s then-president, Sam Altman, to help develop YC China.

When Y Combinator abandoned its expansion plans in China a year later, Lu and his team continued their work under the MiraclePlus brand. Since then, the company has backed a number of Chinese startups, including the artificial intelligence platform SiliconFlow and the robotics manufacturer AgiBot.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Ding secretly collaborated with two Chinese artificial intelligence companies while he was still working at Google. In January, he was found guilty in a case that became one of the most high-profile cases of intellectual property theft in the field of AI between the world’s two largest economies.

According to the prosecution, Ding copied more than 2,000 pages of documents containing trade secrets to his own cloud storage and later downloaded them to his personal computer. This occurred less than two weeks before his dismissal from Google in December 2023.

Dean’s defense team insisted that the stolen documents did not meet the legal definition of a trade secret. The attorneys also argued that the prosecution had failed to prove their client’s intent to use the materials for the benefit of his own company or China. In September, the court sentenced Dean to one year in prison.

Source: Bloomberg

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