ByteDance Sues Intern For $1.1 Million Over ‘AI Sabotage’

TikTok parent ByteDance is a suing a former intern for $1.1 million in China, saying he sabotaged the company’s artificial intelligence large language model training infrastructure.

ByteDance is seeking 8 million yuan in damages from the intern, Tian Keyu, in a lawsuit filed with the Haidian District People’s Court in Beijing, the state-owned Legal Weekly reported this week.

Tian allegedly manipulated the training model’s code and made unauthorised modifications to it, according to Legal Weekly, which cited an internal ByteDance memo.

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While lawsuits between companies and employees are common in China, legal action against an intern and for such a large sum is unusual.

ByteDance’s suit comes after the case drew widespread attention within China due to its focus on AI LLM training.

The technology 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.

Its development is seen as especially crucial in China, as the country races to become an AI leader amid a heated technology war with Western rivals like the United States.

ByteDance declined to comment on the lawsuit. Tian, whom other Chinese media outlets have identified as a postgraduate student at Peking University, did not respond to emailed messages.

ByteDance had said in a social media post in October that it had dismissed Tian in August.

It also said that, while there were rumours that the case had cost ByteDance losses worth millions of dollars and involved over 8,000 graphics processing units, these were “seriously exaggerated.”

Reuters, with additional editing by Vishakha Saxena

Vishakha Saxena

Vishakha Saxena is the Multimedia and Social Media Editor at Asia Financial. She has worked as a digital journalist since 2013, and is an experienced writer and multimedia producer. As a trader and investor, she is keenly interested in new economy, emerging markets and the intersections of finance and society. You can write to her at [email protected]