Beijing engineer jailed 5 years 10 months for deleting AI data

Beijing's first criminal case involving damage to AI models has concluded. An algorithm engineer, Wang, was sentenced to 5 years and 10 months in prison for deleting 89TB of R&D data from his company's AI game department. He also has to pay over 204,000 yuan in compensation.

Wang worked in the AI short-drama department. In September 2024, the company moved data to a new server cluster and told staff not to use the old one. But Wang logged into the old cluster with his previous account. He couldn't find his own department's folder, so he deleted the AI game department's files instead. That included self-developed text-to-3D and rendering models and training data.

The deletion ran for over 17 hours before IT staff noticed and stopped it. It paralyzed the model training system and halted all related projects. The court upheld the verdict in June this year.