BEIJING — Chinese company ByteDance is suing a former intern for $1.1 million, alleging he deliberately attacked its infrastructure for training large artificial intelligence language models, a case that has attracted widespread attention in China in a context of passionate race for AI.
TikTok’s parent company is seeking 8 million yuan ($1.1 million) in damages from former intern, Tian Keyu, in a lawsuit filed at the Haidian District People’s Court in Beijing, the official Legal Weekly reported this week.
While lawsuits between companies and employees are common in China, legal proceedings against an intern for such a large sum are unusual.
The case attracted attention due to its focus on AI LLM training, a technology that has attracted global interest in the context of rapid technological advances in so-called generative AI, used to produce text, images or other results from large volumes of data.
ByteDance declined to comment on the lawsuit Thursday. Tian, who other Chinese media outlets identified as a graduate student at Peking University, did not immediately respond to emailed messages.
Tian allegedly deliberately sabotaged the team’s model training tasks through code manipulation and unauthorized changes, according to Legal Weekly, which cited an internal ByteDance memo.
In a social media post in October, ByteDance said it had fired the intern in August. He said that while rumors were circulating that the deal had cost ByteDance millions of dollars and involved more than 8,000 graphics processing units, these were “seriously exaggerated.”