ByteDance, the owner of TikTok and Douyin, filed a lawsuit against a former intern, accusing him of tampering with code and sabotaging an artificial intelligence (AI) training project and demanding 8 million yuan (US$1.1 million) in compensation as well as a public apology, according to a local media report.
The case has already been accepted by the Haidian District Court in Beijing, Chinese media outlet Southern Metropolis Daily reported on Wednesday.
In October, rumours circulated on Chinese social media suggesting that a ByteDance intern’s actions targeting the company’s large language model (LLM) had caused significant damage. At the time, ByteDance clarified that the individual was terminated in August for “maliciously interfering” with a training task.
However, the company disputed speculation that the disruption involved more than 8,000 graphics processing units and resulted in losses amounting to tens of millions of US dollars, calling such claims exaggerated.
This month, ByteDance included the case in an internal disciplinary notice, which identified the intern, surnamed Tian, as having acted out of dissatisfaction with the team’s resource allocation.
The notice stated that Tian tampered with code to disrupt a research project’s model training work, causing significant waste of resources. The company said it reported Tian’s actions to two professional ethics organisations in China – the Trust and Integrity Enterprise Alliance and the Enterprise Anti-Fraud Alliance – as well as to Tian’s university.
Despite these measures, the former intern repeatedly denied any wrongdoing during the investigations, leading the company to pursue legal action, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported, citing an unnamed internal source.
