Major Bay Area Artificial Intelligence Company Scale AI (which recently received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta) alleges in a lawsuit that a former employee jumped over a vessel into rivals and stole over 100 confidential documents.
While employed as manager on the size of San Francisco, Eugene Lin coordinated with AI competitor Mercor.io to steal his own material, filed against Ling and Mercor on Wednesday in U.S. District Court for San Francisco.
Lynn challenged social media platform X on Wednesday to deal with legal action in an unusual move.
“I heard I was being sued on scale,” Lin wrote. “Last month I left Scale and worked on Melkor. When Scale reached out for some of the files I had on my personal drive, I asked if I could remove them. But Scale asked me not to do anything with them.
Lin wrote that he “never used” the file in his new job at Melkor. “There was no really unfaithful intention here,” Lynn added.
Suryamida, co-founder of Melkor, which runs an AI-powered recruitment and job search platform, said that while his company hired many people who left the scale behind, “we are not interested in the trade secrets of scale and actually operate our business in a different way.”
Ling told Mercor: “He has old documents on his personal Google Drive. “We reached out six days ago, six days ago when we offered to destroy the files or get Eugene to reach a different resolution.
Scale, which sells AI products and services for business and government use, claimed that it “started downloading sensitive documents about Scale's business and customers” when it began looking for new jobs in June.
The document says it “compensates with a roadmap that is unfairly competing with scale in certain customer projects,” the lawsuit reveals details of theft of the suspected secrets through forensic analysis of Lynn's returned company laptop.
Scale seeks unspecified damages and a court order prohibiting Melkor and Lin from requiring them to return stolen documents and information, excluding Marker and Lin's use or disclosure of Scale's trade secrets.
The lawsuit “sought to bypass the time and investment needed to develop its own business strategy by illegally acquiring an industry leader of its size,” the lawsuit allegedly.
Ling and Mercor also allegedly focused on one of Scale's top customers (called “Customer A” in the lawsuit) in order for Mercor to “reignite” its relationship with its customers.
“Melkor has specifically recruited Mr. Lin to expand his relationship with this customer,” the lawsuit states. “While still being employed on a large scale, Lin met with Melkor CEO. The next day, Lin dramatically increased confidential documents, especially customer A's downloads.”
Scale says it believes Ling is planning to use documents that are allegedly stolen to compete illegally against the size of its customers, including Customer A and five.
“To this day, Lin improperly owns trade secrets of scale and continues to work on Melkor's accounts with customers for the benefit of Melkor,” the lawsuit allegedly.
