TikTok owner seeks $1.1 million from former intern accused of sabotaging AI project
China’s ByteDance is suing a former intern for $1.1 million, alleging he deliberately attacked its artificial intelligence large language model training infrastructure.
BEIJING — China’s ByteDance is suing a former intern for $1.1 million, alleging he deliberately attacked its artificial intelligence large language model training infrastructure, a case that has drawn widespread attention within China amid a heated AI race.
The parent company of TikTok is seeking 8 million yuan ($1.1 million) in damages from the former intern, Tian Keyu, in a lawsuit filed with the Haidian District People’s Court in Beijing, the state-owned Legal Weekly reported this week.
While lawsuits between companies and employees are common in China, legal action against an intern and for such a large sum is unusual.
The case has drawn attention due to its focus on AI LLM training, a technology that has captured global interest amid rapid technological advances in so-called generative AI, used to produce text, images or other output from large bodies of data.
ByteDance declined to comment on the lawsuit on Thursday. Tian, whom other Chinese media outlets have identified as a postgraduate student at Peking University, did not immediately respond to emailed messages.
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