Model weights stolen on a USB still meet theft and confidential-information doors

Cyber Desk · Insight. Series: Digital disputes, as Indian courts actually see them.

Model weights stolen on a USB still meet theft and confidential-information doors.

An engineer copies the company’s LLM checkpoint to a drive in the last week before resigning. No source code printed. No client list in Excel. Just “weights.” The medium is new. The doorway is not. If the file was proprietary, access-controlled, and taken without authority, the dispute still runs through theft, confidential information, and employment/contract routes — the same doors that catch a stolen database dump. Calling it a model does not make the USB invisible.

USB checkpoint.

Trade secret doors still open.