ByteDance seeks $1.1 million damages from intern in AI breach case, report says

BEIJING (Reuters) – 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.

Tian is alleged to have deliberately sabotaged the team’s model training tasks through code manipulation and unauthorized modifications, according to Legal Weekly, which cited an internal ByteDance memo.

In a social media post in October, ByteDance said it had dismissed the intern in August. It said that, while there were rumors that the case had cost ByteDance losses in millions of dollars and involving over 8,000 graphics processing units, these were “seriously exaggerated.”