Top Manager in Moscow Fired for Uploading Confidential Data to DeepSeek

A Moscow court has rejected a lawsuit filed by a former sales director of an engineering company seeking reinstatement and compensation. According to court documents reviewed by RIA Novosti, the employee was dismissed for leaking trade secrets to external sources, specifically the DeepSeek AI service. This was reported by Ixbt.com reports.

It is noted that the woman had worked at the company for less than six months as a sales director with a monthly salary exceeding 800,000 rubles. After being fired, she demanded that the management's order be declared illegal, that the basis for the termination of her employment contract be changed to "by mutual agreement," and that a "golden parachute" compensation of 5 million rubles stipulated in the contract be paid.

Consequences of violating security protocols

Court materials indicate that there was no operational necessity for the plaintiff to extract information from the employer's locally protected storage devices, forward it to an external email address not controlled by the company, or upload it to the third-party DeepSeek service. Company management classified this action as a serious violation of security and trade secret protection policies.

As a reminder, in late July, it was revealed that due to a data-sharing feature in the interface of the Chinese DeepSeek chatbot, users' private correspondence, including client communications and sensitive business documents, had leaked into the public domain.

The issue of corporate data security

This court case once again demonstrates how dangerous the use of modern technologies and AI tools can be in a corporate environment. Today, the uncontrolled use of public neural networks like ChatGPT or DeepSeek by employees in their work often leads to confidential information falling into the hands of third parties.

Legal experts note that this court ruling could serve as an important precedent for other companies in Russia. Employers are now taking a stricter approach to digital hygiene and requirements for protecting confidential data, implementing measures to strictly limit the use of modern AI services.