BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s ByteDance is taking legal action against a former intern for $1.1 million, accusing him of intentionally targeting its artificial intelligence large language model training infrastructure. This case has sparked significant interest in China amid a competitive AI landscape.
The parent company of TikTok is pursuing damages of 8 million yuan ($1.1 million) from the former intern, Tian Keyu, in a lawsuit filed with the Haidian District People’s Court in Beijing, as reported by the state-owned Legal Weekly.
While disputes between companies and employees are common in China, suing an intern for such a substantial amount is uncommon.
This case has garnered attention due to its emphasis on AI LLM training, a technology that has attracted global attention due to rapid advancements in generative AI, which is used to generate text, images, and other content from extensive datasets.
ByteDance has chosen not to comment on the lawsuit at this time. Tian, who has been identified by other Chinese media outlets as a postgraduate student at Peking University, has not responded to email inquiries.
Tian is accused of intentionally disrupting the team’s model training tasks by manipulating code and making unauthorized changes, according to Legal Weekly, which referenced an internal memo from ByteDance.
In an October social media post, ByteDance announced that the intern had been terminated in August. The company clarified that rumors of the case resulting in losses amounting to millions of dollars and involving over 8,000 graphics processing units were “greatly exaggerated.”