ByteDance Sues Intern For $1.1 Billion In Damages From AI Breach

The Chinese giant ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is suing its former intern, Tian Keyu, for $1.1 million in damages from an AI breach. Bytedance alleges that Tian manipulated the code by making unauthorized changes.

According to Reuters, ByteDance is accusing Tian of deliberately attacking the company’s AI model training infrastructure and has filed a lawsuit with the Haidian District People’s Court in Beijing, China.

The information was revealed by the international news agency today, and Bytedance has declined to comment on the case. The intern, a postgraduate student at Peking University, hasn’t commented or shared any public statement yet.

While lawsuits from companies to employees are common in China, it is rare to see lawsuits for such a large sum.

According to The Guardian, the incident happened in August and the company fired the intern for sabotaging and claimed that the person ‘maliciously interfered’ with the AI project.

The news went viral and was largely commented on on social media channels. Back then, Bytedance shared a public statement and called the rumors “exaggerations” including those saying that 8,000 graphic units were compromised and that the losses were around tens of millions of dollars.

Users on Reddit debated multiple theories of what could have happened and whether he was guilty or not. “Apparently, he implanted a backdoor into checkpoint models (unsafe pickle) to gain access to systems and then used this to sabotage colleagues’ work,” wrote a user. “Quite some heavy lifting for an intern,” added another user.